At Private Colleges, Students Pay for Prestige

Americans tend to think of colleges as falling somewhere on a vast hierarchy based largely on their status and brand recognition. At the top are the Harvards and the Stanfords, with their celebrated faculty, groundbreaking research, and perfectly manicured quads. Toward the bottom are the chronically underfunded community colleges and obscure state schools, where part-time students and drab buildings are the norm. And then there are the predatory for-profit colleges that pray on the most vulnerable students—like veterans and single moms.

This “,” as a higher-education expert once put it, isn’t limited to the United States. A testament to this trend has been the of global university rankings, including those released annually by the United Kingdom–based publication () in partnership with Thomson Reuters. To rank the schools for the 2018 list, surveys among a group of more than 10,000 academics across 138 countries, asking them to assess institutions’ “esteem” via questions about research and teaching. The rankings have their , but they’re the most when it comes to comparing universities from country to country. Plus, in explicitly treating a university’s perceived “esteem” as a proxy for its caliber, ’s rankings offer a compelling look at how the most prestigious colleges vary depending on where that college is located.