The UK and Switzerland have the best-value higher education systems in the world while the US languishes in 16th place, according to the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2011-12.
The rankings, unveiled last month (October), also spring a surprise at the top, where Harvard University is dethroned by the California Institute of Technology. Caltech snatches first place thanks mainly to a 16 percent rise in research funding. This is bad news for Harvard which also pushed to second position in the QS World University Rankings 2011 released in September.
However, in terms of overall number of institutions in the top 200, the US leads the way with 75, followed by the UK (32), Germany (12), the Netherlands (12) and Canada (9).
But when that table is adjusted for national spending on higher education, Switzerland has the most universities in the top 200 per billion dollars spent, followed by the UK in second place and the Netherlands in third. The US finishes 16th by this measure.
Critics of the higher education reforms in England, where the bulk of public funding is being replaced with private investment in the form of higher tuition fees, see the rankings as a warning against any shift to the marketised US model. Comments Howard Hotson, professor of early modern intellectual history at the University of Oxford, who has become a prominent critic of the government’s higher education policy:” You can turn the data from the World University Rankings upside down and inside out... to measure different things; but the end results are more or less the same. Several small and prosperous countries — notably the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark — do best in per capita terms; the UK comes at or near the top of the value-for-money table; and Switzerland does exceptionally well across the board. The US, by contrast, offers unimpressive performance in per capita terms and very poor value for money.”
Many US public universities — notably those in California — have slipped in the rankings as funding falls amid state budget crises. But Bruce Johnstone, emeritus professor of higher and comparative education at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, predicts that the US will remain globally dominant. “The bottom line is the US gives a tremendous amount of money to higher education because of the combination of taxpayer revenue, tuition revenue and philanthropic revenue,” he says, highlighting philanthropy as an income source not available to competitor nations.
Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education