Pac-12 schools popular around the world, judging by online traffic

Editor's Note: Arizona State University basketball will take on the University of Washington on Feb. 16. The men’s teams will play at 8 p.m., PT in Seattle, and the women’s teams at 6:30 p.m., MT in Tempe. Read more about ASU's collaborations with Pac-12 schools.

The schools in the Pac-12 are among the most popular universities in the world, according to a recent worldwide ranking.

Arizona State University has long been a top choice for international students, drawing a record 4,430 in the Fall 2011 semester. The University of Washington isn’t far behind, enrolling 4,233.

Another ranking gauges worldwide popularity in a different way. The 4 International Colleges and Universities (4ICU) organization ranks the popularity of different universities’ websites around the world. Its aim is to help international students and academic staff to understand how popular a specific school is in a foreign country.

By this metric, eight of the universities in the Pac-12 are in the top 50 websites clicked on by people throughout the world, out of 11,000 accredited four-year colleges and universities in 200 countries.

ASU’s website ranks 42, though it is 20th in the nation for international enrollment. Other Pac-12 schools with websites in the top 50 are Stanford, 2; UC Berkeley, 4; Washington, 9; UCLA, 14; Arizona, 27; USC, 28; and Colorado, 49.

The No. 1 school website is Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with Harvard coming in at 3. Among the top 50, only six schools were outside of the United States.

The ranking is updated every month, using three unbiased and independent Web metrics from three different search engines. The ranking list is at www.4icu.org/top200.