Oxford University has retained the number one spot in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for a ninth year in a row. But the reputation of the wider UK sector is rapidly eroding, with a similar trend seen in the US.

Oxford’s reign is now the longest in the history of the league table, beating Harvard’s eight-year stint which ended in 2011. The institution’s performance has been bolstered by significant improvements in its income from industry and the number of patents that cite its research, as well as its teaching scores.

Across the Atlantic, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is now the US’ highest-ranked university, in second place globally, its best-ever performance. It replaces Stanford, which has dropped from second to sixth, its lowest position since 2010, driven by declining scores for teaching, research environment and international outlook.

Harvard University has moved from fourth to third place and Princeton from sixth to fourth. MIT and Princeton are proving to be dark horses, with the data revealing steady improvement in their positions over the past decade.

But while the top of the ranking is still dominated by US and UK institutions, the data behind it reveals a more worrisome trend: both countries are seeing a rapid decline in their average research and teaching reputation.

The UK’s teaching reputation has dropped by 3 percent since last year and research reputation by 5 percent, based on more than 93,000 responses to THE’s Academic Reputation Survey, in which academics choose up to 15 institutions they believe excel in teaching and, separately, research.

Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, UK, believes the decline in teaching reputation is due to underfunding. “When you underfund university teaching, as we have been doing, the result is often worse staff-to-student ratios, problems with marking and evaluation and inadequate contact hours or class sizes. If you do this while other countries take the opposite route, your relative position is bound to deteriorate,” he says.

The reputation of the US sector is also falling. In the past year alone, there has been a 4 percent drop in the country’s share of votes for teaching and a 3 percent drop for research. Meanwhile, universities based outside the US and UK have 51 percent of the vote share for teaching and 49 percent for research, up from 37 and 35 percent respectively a decade ago. The key countries gaining in esteem are China, France and Germany.

Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at Oxford, says the trends mainly reflected “other systems coming up than the US and UK declining”. “One of the longer-term factors is the comparative rise in resources and capability of national systems in Western Europe and East and Southeast Asia. On the whole, Europeanisation — including Bologna-style cooperation and the framework research programmes, such as the current Horizon — have strengthened universities in continental Europe,” he says. Meanwhile, China’s rise in reputation is “very much driven by increasing levels of government investment.”

Prof. Marginson says that the “intrinsic academic strength” of anglophone countries’ universities “remains strong”. But he warns that “if UK higher education goes another decade without fixing the now bankrupted 2012 funding system in which it is politically impossible to increase the unit of resource, then it will pay the price in terms of reputation as well as resources”.