<p>^ you’re drawing distinctions too finely. I’m sure there’s a margin of error given the sampling, but saying that UMass is “ahead of” those schools, when the difference is <1% for Columbia and Penn, is only technically true. Yes, THE did give them specific ranks, rather than place them in tiers, but I don’t think they intended for any real distinctions to be made among the schools you listed, because there really aren’t any in terms of international prestige. Similarly, even though the spread is greater among the top 2-6 schools, the survey pretty much says to me “Harvard is #1, and #2 is a rough tie among MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and Oxbridge.” You’ll see steeper drop-offs after those 6.</p>
<p>It’s also totally plausible that schools like UMass would be more internationally prestigious than other schools we regard as prestigious in the US, since international prestige is perhaps even more dependent on research productivity. (Of course, I don’t think the data is saying that about UMass, anyway.)</p>