The University of Cambridge has emerged as the world's fourth highest-ranked and Britain's leading university in the Times Higher Education’s (THE) World Reputation Rankings 2016, the magazine’s list of the world’s most prestigious universities.

However, the newest rankings also see Oxbridge slide down the rankings, Cambridge and Oxford having placed second and third respectively in 2015.

The University of Oxford followed Cambridge in fifth place, a further eight British institutions making the top 100 – making the UK the second-most represented nation on the list.

The rankings continue to be dominated by American universities, with Harvard taking first place for the sixth year running. The runner up was an institution from the same city as Harvard, namely the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Other American universities to appear in the top 10 include the West Coast trio of Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology as well as Ivy League institutions Princeton, Yale, and Columbia.

Despite two of its institutions appearing in the top 10, UK universities lost some ground, concurrent with the continuing astronomic rise of Asian institutions. While British universities such as Bristol and Durham fell out of the top 100, Asia now boats 18 ranked institutions, compared with 10 last year, with Japan’s University of Tokyo the highest-ranked of these, taking 12th place.

Tsinghua University was ranked 18th, making it the first Chinese university to break into the top 20, while Peking University took a respectable 21st place.

The rankings, which are available in 15 languages, are created using the world’s largest invitation-only academic opinion survey and were this year based on 10,323 responses from 133 countries.

Questionnaires are targeted at experienced and published scholars, who are asked for their views on excellence in research and teaching within their disciplines and at institutions with which they are familiar.

Paul Blackmore, Professor of Higher Education at the Policy Institute at King’s College London, said that Asia’s rising performance is due to a combination of “undoubted growth in university systems” and “of more being known among those giving a view,” adding that the long-standing, highly Anglo-Saxon view of higher education “can’t be sustained for much longer.”

Vice-President and Chair Professor of Comparative Policy at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University, Joshua Mok Ka-Ho suggested that Asia’s performance reflects the significant higher education investments many Asian governments are making, as well as universities concentrating funding on strengthening their research capabilities and publishing in international journals.

Given that the recent increase in higher education expenditure in Asia coincides with a rankings boost for the continent’s universities, it is possible that the UK’s continued cuts in higher education funding are having an impact on its global reputation. The Higher Education Funding Council for England has received a £150m budget slash so far this year.

It has been suggested that restrictive immigration measures could be affecting the entry of overseas students and scholars into UK universities. THE’s rankings editor, Phil Baty, commented that “the UK will have to ensure that it can still draw in talent and investment from across the world” and “does not lose its position at the heart of higher education’s global elite.”

With the UK losing two institutions out of this year’s ranking, the Netherlands has also dropped back, seeing four of its five representatives losing places in the ranking. Denmark and Finland no longer have any representatives among the top 100 at all, having each had one institution in last year’s rankings. France, meanwhile, continues to have a strong cohort, with five French universities making the top 100 this year, including newcomer INSEAD.