HIGHER EDUCATION IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT: DRIVERS OF TOP-UNIVERSITIES’ REPUTATION

In global knowledge economies, the relevance of higher education has been described as more important than ever as mediums for a wide range of cross border relationships and continuous flows of people, information, knowledge, technologies, products and financial capital. Moreover, in a context characterized by an increasing competition among university institutions, reputation is constantly used as a screening mechanism of service suppliers and it provides interesting benefits to educational stakeholders, such as faculty and students. In this sense, higher education ranking systems play a crucial role in classifying universities according to different criteria. Henceforth, in this paper (a) focuses on those educational institutions placed in the upper side of the hierarchy established by higher education institutions ranking systems to (b) investigate the influence of top university institutions' research, teaching and internationalization on their level of corporate reputation. To address such aim, we take two datasets from Times Higher Education Supplement ranking as basis for our analyses, i.e., the world universities ranking and the reputation ranking. Results reveal that, while research and teaching positively influence top universities' reputation, internationalization does not exert a significant direct influence.