Dive Brief:
- Google’s top 20 most-searched universities during the last 12 months include nine U.S. schools, six from India, and five in the United Kingdom.
- No. 1 on the list is the University of Phoenix, for-profit Apollo Education's well-known chain of online and campus-based schools.
- Rounding out the top five are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at No. 2, Open University in the U.K., the University of Calicut in India, and the University of California-Los Angeles.
Dive Insight:
The other U.S. universities in the top 20 Google searches are Stanford University at No. 7, Columbia University at No. 9, No. 10 New York University, No. 14 Florida State University, No. 15 Harvard University, No. 17 Liberty University, and No. 19 Michigan University. Google provided the list at the request of the BBC, which reports that a lot of the activity is driven by searches for online courses. By 2013, there were more searches for online universities than traditional higher ed institutions. By 2014, there were more searches for Coursera, the massive open online course provider, than any U.K. university.
