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We’ve long suspected that London is the best city in the world (we’re not at all biased) but a new list of the most reputable universities on the planet has just confirmed the capital’s dominance in yet another field.
In this year’s World Reputation rankings by Times Higher Education (THE), London is the city with the most universities in the top 100.
Imperial College London (at number 14), University College London (UCL) (at 25), the London School of Economics (LSE) (36) and King’s College London (42) all made it into THE’s ranking this year. The UK has 10 distinguished unis on the list, including Oxford (joint second), Cambridge (fourth), Edinburgh (at 30) and Manchester (at 50).
Thanks to all those prestigious unis, London beat out the city of Cambridge in Massachusetts, which holds the two top spots with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and New York, which also has two universities in the top 100 – Columbia and New York University (NYU).
Times Higher Education’s ‘reputation’ list ranks the top universities for academic rep and prestige globally, with 38 countries represented in their longlist of 300 institutions. It’s different to THE’s best unis list, which dropped last October – this one involves carefully selected scholars voting on which institutions are best for research and teaching in their specific fields.
You can read the full Times Higher Education World Reputation list for 2025 here.
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