According to the Times Higher Education website the list is made by 17,554 leading academics from 149 countries who have rated campuses across the world according to how good they thought their research and teaching were.
With university tuition fees rocketing and more applicants fighting for places, university reputation is set to be an even bigger focus for prospective students.
Here's all the data for you to explore. Let us know what you can do with it.
2012 reputation rank, University, and Country;
1 Harvard University United States
2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology United States
3 University of Cambridge United Kingdom
4 Stanford University United States
5 University of California, Berkeley United States
6 University of Oxford United Kingdom
7 Princeton University United States
8 University of Tokyo Japan
9 University of California, Los Angeles United States
10 Yale University United States
11 California Institute of Technology United States
12 University of Michigan United States
13 Imperial College London United Kingdom
14 University of Chicago United States
15 Columbia University United States
16 Cornell University United States
16 University of Toronto Canada
18 Johns Hopkins University United States
19 University of Pennsylvania United States
20 Kyoto University Japan
21 University College London United Kingdom
22 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich Switzerland
23 University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign United States
23 National University of Singapore Singapore
25 University of British Columbia Canada
25 McGill University Canada
27 University of Wisconsin-Madison United States
28 University of Washington United States
29 London School of Economics and Political Science United Kingdom
30 Tsinghua University China
31 University of California, San Francisco United States
32 University of Texas at Austin United States
33 Duke University United States
34 New York University United States
35 Northwestern University United States
36 University of California, San Diego United States
37 Carnegie Mellon University United States
38 Peking University China
39 The University of Hong Kong Hong Kong
39 University of Massachusetts United States
41 Georgia Institute of Technology United States
42 Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Germany
43 University of Melbourne Australia
44 Australian National University Australia
44 University of California, Davis United States
46 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill United States
47 University of Minnesota United States
47 Purdue University United States
49 University of Edinburgh United Kingdom
50 The University of Sydney
Source: TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION, THOMSON REUTERS
