It’s not Harvard. It’s not MIT (though that school is number two). It’s not Cambridge or Oxford.

It’s the University of Phoenix.

Sean Coughlan reports for BBC:

Google reveals most searched-for universities

Google has revealed the most popular searches for people around the world looking for universities.

This ranking of online searches is very different from the traditional map of the global powerhouses of higher education.

There is a strong interest in online courses, rather than traditional campus-based universities, says Google.

And there are five Indian institutions in the top 20 of most searched-for universities.

The top search worldwide is for the University of Phoenix, a US-based, for-profit university, with many online courses and a sometimes controversial record on recruitment.

The University of Phoenix, founded in the 1970s, comes ahead of famous US academic institutions such as Harvard, Stanford and Columbia.

Online students
In second place in this league table of university searches is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – last week ranked as the world’s best university and also an institution with a strong record for pioneering online courses.