Thursday Dec 12, 2024
Thursday Dec 12, 2024
Wednesday, 1 June 2016 15:30 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Now you might, reasonably, say that this is an outcome of colonialism – and certainly the votes in North America and Asia make up for this in the overall results. What do they look like in terms of subjects? Remember that I said that we balanced opinions by subject? Well, when we look at how strong the reputation of these superbrands is across the subject areas, we see some interesting differences. First, here are our broad subject categories
Let’s start with the big beast: Harvard. Looking at the data, Harvard does especially well when it comes to clinical reputation, but also does very well in business and life sciences. Its weakest areas (and let’s be clear, they are only relatively weak) are computer sciences, engineering and physical sciences. Now let’s look at two that are somewhat similar: MIT and Stanford. Unlike Harvard, their reputations are heavily engineering focused. As we might expect, MIT is a bit more engineering focused, Stanford gets more of a boost from Business. (Oh, and please note that these graphs aren’t to scale with each other – don’t compare this one with the Harvard one.) So far we’ve been exploring US institutions. Let’s hop back across the Atlantic and examine Oxford and Cambridge. If I could see similarities in reputation for MIT and Stanford, then when we look at Oxford and Cambridge we see almost identical shapes – to the extent that it’s tempting to think that some academics are actually voting for Oxbridge as a single entity (to the chagrin of some, including the Cambridge vice-chancellor). Here, arts and humanities, social sciences and physical sciences are much stronger. Perhaps worryingly for these two noble institutions is that the presence of the Saïd and Judge business schools doesn’t seem to have transferred into active reputation yet. The final one of our superbrands is Berkeley. And, if we ignore clinical and health (which is actually a specialism of other parts of the University of California system), then there is a strong argument to say that Berkeley is actually the most rounded of the six in terms of its reputation scores. What might these brands be worth? Now this is where it gets really interesting. How much is all this reputation worth? Conventional mechanisms for calculating brand value probably aren’t applicable for universities, but there can be little doubt that students and prospective students see the value in gaining a degree from one of these institutions. Can that be expressed in dollars? Probably, but that’s an analysis for another day.
