While most Americans are familiar with the U.S. News and World Report’s list of “best colleges,” they are probably less aware of the international university rankings. There are three major ones: QS World University Rankings, which provide the basis for U.S.News’s rankings of the “World’s Best Universities”; the Times Higher Education’s list; and Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s “Academic Ranking of World Universities.
All three release their findings as the school year begins. Each employs a similar blend of indicators, which purportedly measure the relative quality of the institutions surveyed. All emphasize institutional reputation expressed in the quality and quantity of faculty publications, peer assessments, faculty/student ratios, budgets and other input quality measures.
These rankings are clearly flawed; for example, it is not evident that the volume of scholarly publications or peer assessments reflect quality in the classroom. Nevertheless, the rankings show that other fast-growing countries are willing to apply their resources to higher education, just as the United States has been doing for years.
Of the 2010 results, Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s is the most interesting. Its appeal lies in its stability. With each release, a flood of critiques prompts some tweaking prior to the next release—tweaks that raise year-to-year reliability questions. But Shanghai is unique. It is sponsored by a university with government backing; it is not a commercial enterprise; and, alone among the big three, it has resisted its critics and not tinkered with its metrics mix on an annual basis. In spite of acknowledged flaws and some minor alterations, it has remained a relatively fixed yardstick in the annual research university beauty and popularity contest since its inception in 2003.
Shanghai’s 2010 ranking cites 500, less than four percent, of the 12,000-plus universities worldwide. At first glance, American higher education institutions look pretty good. They continue to dominate the top 100. Harvard is number one; eight out of the top 10 are American (the others are Oxford and Cambridge), and 54 of the top 100 are American. But last year the United States had 67 of the top 100.
Complacent university officials are likely to assert that the 2010 results affirm the U.S. higher education community’s continued dominance. But they will be wrong. The more uneasy within the American higher education community will see the 2010 Shanghai rankings as a bellwether. Competition is entering the lower tiers. The full top-500 listing may foretell the future.
“The rising stars for scientific research are China (nine in 2004 and 20 in 2010), South Korea (eight in 2004 and 10 in 2010), Brazil (four in 2004 and six in 2010) and the Middle East (none in 2004 and four from Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran in 2010),” wrote the University World News, a London-based publication specializing in international higher education, quoting Richard Holmes, whose University Ranking blog is a watchdog of the listings.
Some within the American academy may observe that U. S. institutions are not necessarily falling behind but, rather, the rest of the world is catching up. That is the point. Serious competition is starting to challenge the dominance of U.S. higher education.
What is driving this increased competition? China, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and other Asian national governments have revised a page from the U.S.’s Cold War playbook. These nations are supporting higher education in a manner akin to the U.S.’s support of the military during the Cold War. India will be establishing 14 new “world class” institutions, and China lavishes funding on its nine self-identified “China Ivy League” universities. As Yale’s president Richard Levin said in a speech last February, “If the emerging nations of Asia concentrate their growing resources on a handful of institutions, tap a worldwide pool of talent, and embrace freedom of expression and freedom of inquiry, they have every prospect of success in building world-class universities.”
These countries have recognized the linkage among high technology, economic growth, workforce development, and higher education’s priorities. The Cold War geopolitical conflict has been replaced by a geo-economic struggle and a subsidiary higher education rivalry, portrayed in the Shanghai rankings.
Something akin to a reinvention of the 1958 National Defense Education Act may be in order to rejuvenate U.S. national and institutional priorities, even though a singular dramatic spur like the 1957 launch of Sputnik is missing.
I will be among the last to advocate spending more tax dollars on American higher education. In fact, we need our institutional leaders and policy makers to make more prudent use of the resources already available, as I have discussed before. They need to focus on carrying out their mission rather than allowing their mission to expand to cover anything anyone wants to do. If our leaders are willing to pay more than lip service to improving our teaching and learning programs, opportunities abound.
Yet, instead of strengthening our academic programming, some are planning costly recreational diversions. In May, the National Football Foundation & College Hall of Fame (NFF) announced that “six new college football teams are set to take the field for the first time this season with 11 more programs set to launch between 2011 and 2013.” Such an announcement is simultaneously sad and humorous. The resources spent to implement and subsequently prop up these programs could be used to improve our technology, science, and engineering programs. We are faced with stadiums versus instructional infrastructure.
I am not confident that American postsecondary institutions will retain their dominance in the global marketplace for long. When the perceived quality of a good or service declines and its price increases, Adam Smith’s invisible hand is uncompromising. Unless U.S. postsecondary institutions improve the perceived quality of their research and teaching and contain their costs, their dominance in the global market will erode at an accelerating rate.