Netherlands Scores Top Spot in Overall Global Reputation Report

Universities in the Netherlands are the most highly regarded by foreign academics from across the globe, an analysis by the prestigious British weekly, Times Higher Education (THE), has found.

The magazine analysed the results of its annual list of the world's most international universities. And although the results put institutions from Hong Kong, Switzerland, the UK and Singapore at the front of the race, a closer look at the data revealed that overall none of these countries as a whole has the strongest global reputation. That honour belongs to the Netherlands.

"The international reputation metric draws on THE’s annual Academic Reputation Survey and is a measure of the proportion of votes that an institution receives from academics outside its home country," the magazine states in an article.

"A country-level analysis shows that the Netherlands has achieved the highest average score on this metric for the past three years (88.8 in 2021), with all six of its representatives in the international ranking receiving a score upwards of 83 out of 100. This year, the UK is second (87.3) and Canada is third (84).

Of the 11 countries included in the analysis, Russia and China received the lowest share of votes from academics outside their countries (they scored 13.7 and 20.6 on this measure respectively). The analysis only included countries with at least three universities in the international ranking, so small systems such as Hong Kong and Singapore were excluded.

Methodology

The THE list of the world’s most international universities is based on data collected for the THE World University Rankings 2021. It is based on four equally weighted metrics:

• Proportion of international staff
• Proportion of international students
• Proportion of international co-authorship (the share of a university’s total research journal publications between 2015 and 2019 that have at least one international co-author, normalised to account for an institution’s subject mix)
• Proportion of international reputation (the share of votes from outside the home country that the institution achieved in THE’s annual Academic Reputation Survey, which asks leading scholars to name the world’s best universities for teaching and research in their fields)

WUP 4/3/2021
by James Wittenborg
©WUAS Press