Duke's global reputation weakens

Despite Duke's recent obsession with global expansion, its global reputation may not be as strong as its national reputation, according to U.S. News and World Report's World's Best University rankings published Tuesday.

Duke was ranked 19 on the list with an overall score of 89.2, which accounted for factors such as academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty-student ratio, international faculty, international students and citations per faculty scores.

Duke had the 13th highest ranking of any U.S. university, which is lower than Duke has ever scored on USNWR's national university rankings.

University of Cambridge topped the list, and each of the following national universities surpassed Duke in the rankings: Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale University, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Stanford University, California Institute of Technology, Princeton University, University of Michigan, Cornell University and Johns Hopkins University.

In the faculty-student ratio category, Duke was 4th of the top 20 universities scoring 99.8 out of 100 and following only Yale, University of Oxford and MIT.

Out of the top 20, Duke had the 10th highest citations per faculty score.

Duke's worst performance was in the international students and employer reputation scores, and the international faculty score was listed as "N/A."

Although Duke did manage to remain ahead of some of its peers, such as University of California at Berkeley (21), Northwestern University (24), Brown University (39) and Dartmouth College (99), it did not manage to retain its spot as 14th on the list from 2010.