By Katherine Landergan, Town Correspondent
July 31, 2013 (BOSTON GLOBE) — A London-based magazine has ranked Boston University and Brown University as schools of equivalent stature in its list of the “top universities by reputation.”
According to the Times Higher Education magazine, BU and Brown tied in the category for the 81st to 90th best universities in the world by reputation.
For the third consecutive year, Harvard snagged the No. 1 spot, and MIT came in second.
According to the Times website, the ranking is based on a reputation survey, which is sent each year to tens of thousands of academics from across the globe.
In the survey, scholars are asked to pick no more than 15 universities that they feel to be the best in reputation.
Examples of survey questions include, “which university would you send your most talented graduates to for the best postgraduate supervision?”
Bari Norman, the co-founder and president of Expert Admissions, said that she was not surprised to learn that BU and Brown tied in an international ranking.
“It makes sense to me,” she said today in a phone interview.
Norman said that outside of the United States, public universities tend to have better reputations than private schools. Although BU is a private institution, its name sounds
like a public school.
“The more elite schools abroad are the ones that are public universities that have the names of the cities in them,” Norman said. “There is the impression, or assumption that the schools with the similar names in the US are paralleled to the ones at home.”
She also said that BU is more well-known abroad because of its large number of international students.
“BU has a strong name overseas, and a tremendous international community,” she said. “…The truth is, you’ll find more people [abroad] who have heard of BU than they will have of Brown.”
Jul 31, 2013
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