Most universities prioritise reputation as a strategic pillar but admit significant difficulty in effectively measuring and managing it.
Current tracking targets internal stakeholders like students, leaving a "blind spot" regarding vital external academic peer perceptions.
Institutions must replace fragmented messaging with unified strategies and systematic tools to track and earn genuine global recognition.
You don't need to ask a university whether reputation matters. Look at almost any mission statement, and it's already there — a promise to be "world-class," a claim to "excellence", a nod to "global impact". Somewhere between three and four out of every five universities write some version of this into their own founding language.
Ask how their reputation is performing — better, worse, holding steady — and the confidence becomes noticeably subdued. Not because nobody's looking, but because almost everyone who is looking will tell you that it's harder to track than they'd like to admit.
20 August 2026
One of the most persistent paradoxes in higher education is the gap between how universities define and measure excellence and how the people they serve actually experience it. Academic reputation, as captured in rankings, peer assessments and citation metrics, is the dominant currency of the global university market. It shapes where students apply, where faculty seek positions and where governments direct research funding. Yet reputation, as it is currently constructed, is substantially blind to the quality of the teaching and learning experience.
This is not a new observation. The limitations of ranking methodologies have been debated at length, and major ranking organisations have responded by adding teaching-related indicators, student satisfaction surveys and employability measures to their frameworks. But these additions have not fundamentally altered the underlying dynamic. The institutions that rise to the top of the most influential rankings are still predominantly research universities, selected primarily on the basis of publication volumes, citation counts, Nobel Prize affiliations and peer reputation surveys completed by academics who know those institutions through their research output rather than their classrooms.
The consequences are significant. Universities face powerful incentives to invest in research infrastructure, to reduce teaching loads for high-output researchers and to recruit faculty primarily on the basis of publication records rather than teaching ability or pedagogical innovation. These are rational responses to the incentive structures that rankings create, but they mean that improvements in teaching quality – which are real, ongoing and in some institutions transformative – are largely invisible in the data that shapes institutional reputation.
Students, who are the primary consumers of teaching and learning, are imperfectly positioned to assess quality before they arrive. They use rankings as proxies for quality because they lack better information. A student choosing between universities in different countries or cities cannot easily assess teaching quality in advance. They can read rankings, look at graduate salaries and examine the credentials of listed faculty, but they cannot audit a seminar, sit in on a lecture or assess the quality of feedback on written assignments. The information asymmetry between institutions and prospective students is substantial, and rankings, for all their limitations, fill a real information vacuum.
This dynamic creates a troubling feedback loop. Universities invest in what rankings measure because rankings drive enrolment. Students rely on rankings because they lack better information. And because rankings measure research more than teaching, the quality of the teaching and learning experience remains underinvested and undersignalled.
What might change this? There are several possibilities, none of them simple.
First, more granular data on the student experience could become publicly available and widely used. Surveys like the National Student Survey in the United Kingdom or the Graduate Outcomes survey provide some insight into the experience of students after the fact, but they are not yet integrated into the dominant ranking frameworks in ways that give them significant weight. Making this data more accessible, more granular and more comparable across institutions and countries would give students better information and give universities clearer incentives to invest in teaching quality.
Second, employers could play a more active role in signalling what they value. If major employers systematically communicated that they weight the quality of graduates’ skills and capabilities over the prestige of their institution – and if this preference were documented and published – it could shift the incentive structures that shape student decisions and institutional investment. There is some evidence that employers in certain sectors are already moving in this direction, placing greater weight on demonstrated competencies than on institutional brand. Making this trend more visible could amplify its effects.
Third, accreditation and quality assurance systems could be strengthened and made more visible to students and the public. Most developed countries have national quality assurance frameworks, but these are often poorly understood outside the higher education sector and do not feed directly into the decision-making calculus of prospective students. A system in which quality assurance outcomes were prominently communicated and easily accessible could provide a meaningful counterweight to research-focused rankings.
Fourth, and most fundamentally, the ranking organisations themselves could be persuaded or pressured to change their methodologies. This has happened incrementally and could happen more substantially if there were sufficient pressure from governments, universities and students. The challenge is that the ranking organisations face their own competitive dynamics: a methodology that deprioritises research is likely to produce different results that different groups will dispute, creating commercial risk for organisations that depend on the perceived legitimacy of their rankings.
None of these changes is imminent, and all of them face structural obstacles. But the direction of travel matters. A higher education system that better rewards teaching quality, better informs student choice and better aligns institutional incentives with student outcomes would serve everyone better – students, institutions and the societies that fund them.
The reputation paradox is not simply a measurement problem. It reflects deeper questions about what universities are for and who they are primarily serving. Until those questions are answered more explicitly, reputation will remain a blind spot: measuring much of what matters least and ignoring much of what matters most.
use digital marketing & communication tools to manage reputation, versus 33% who use reputation monitoring or social listening software to actually track it. 15% report using no tools at all — still a manual process
So when institution representatives are asked directly what stands in their way, the answer isn't ambition; it's plumbing. Measuring and tracking reputation effectively tops the list, by a clear margin. Dispersed data across departments and uncoordinated messaging tie for second.
Not a sector short on caring. A sector short on the systems that would let that caring add up to something measurable.
cite difficulty measuring and tracking reputation effectively as a top challenge — ahead of dispersed data across departments (54%) and uncoordinated messaging from a lack of unified strategy (54%, tied)
Which brings us back to where we started. Whether reputation matters was never really in question; the sector answered that unanimously. The harder question, the one most institutions still can't answer with much confidence, is who inside their walls could actually tell them — with evidence, not instinct — whether their reputation is rising or falling, and on whose terms it's being judged.
SNarayani Prakash is a Senior Product Manager at QS, leading SaaS products that help universities strengthen institutional reputation, stakeholder engagement and global partnerships through data-driven product innovation and strategy.Juan Carlos Mejía Cuartas is an International Higher Education Manager with 20 years of global leadership experience. He currently leads capacity building strategies for universities worldwide at QS Quacquarelli Symonds.
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