MUFA Day#39: TOP UNIVERSITIES IN THE WORLD: Best of Asia

This is Day #39 with the next few days "just" golfing and eating on Kenji's Golf Safari.  For the next couple of days, then, I will insert items of interest that occupied my attention during My Ultimate Golf Adventure.

Education has been my whole life.  Whether it was as a student, professor or observer, I've had some crusades involving aspects of education.  I began my chapter on this subject in SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity with a gripe that teachers were not sufficiently paid, our STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) program was lacking and students were doing terribly compared to other developed countries.  However, when I completed this chapter, I wondered, if our educational system was so crummy, why is our nation so supreme.  

I then completely re-wrote my education chapter and totally adjusted the presentation.  You, of course, need to read the details about how I think we could be so much better as a society with really early education beginning at the age of two, and that our schools need to cover the full rainbow spectrum of education by focusing a lot more on the SEVEN R'S...but the overriding factor was that the USA is doing fine in education, and the reason is because of our superior higher education system.  To quote from the link in the previous sentence:

So is the U.S. in trouble? Is the strongest economy ever a generation or two away from mediocrity? Nope. There is one area where we still lead in education: higher education. The total expenditure per student in the U.S. is $18,570, compared to Denmark in second place with $11,600 and Britain in third with $8970.

We have 17 of the 20 best universities in the world. As a nation, we have, apparently, decided to focus on the few who will lead and produce. Even at this stage, there will be more followers than chiefs. But this system is working, and could well be the answer to our success.

We are not today as dominating as a few years ago, but still doing fine in higher education, and in world dominance.  The following ranks our institutions compared to the rest of the world.

The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings (THEWRR), presented by Thomson Reuters, lists the following top ten universities:

1.  Harvard
2.  MIT
3.  Cambridge
4.  Oxford
5.  California at Berkeley
6.  Stanford
7.  Princeton
8.  UCLA
9.  Tokyo
10.  Yale

Twenty eight out the top fifty are from the United States, and 43 of the best 100.  You could surmise that the UK would look good, as Times Higher Education is a British magazine.  Thomson Reuters also has deep UK roots, although their  headquarters are now in New York City.

There are two other influential rankings:  the QS World University Rankings (also UK) and the Academic Ranking of World Universities (Shanghai Jiaotong University).  Shanghai was the first to publish a ranking, in 2003, and they list 500 universities.  The top three for QS are MIT, Cambridge and Harvard, while Shanghai has it Harvard, Stanford and MIT.

The top ten from Asia according to THEWRR are:

1.  Tokyo
2.  National University of Singapore
3.  Hong Kong
4.  Peking
5.  Pohang University of Science and Technology (South Korea)
6.  Tsinghua
7.  Kyoto
8.  Seoul National University
9.  Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
10.  Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Of this Asian top 100, Japan had 22, Taiwan 17, China 15 and South Korea 14.  The rise of South Korea and Taiwan is a bit surprising.  The list extends to the Middle East, with Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) at #15, Middle East Technical University (Turkey) at #22, Sharif University of Technology (Iran) at #42 and King Abdulaziz University at #49 (Saudi Arabia).  The disappointment is India, with none in the top 10 and only 3 in the best 100.  Hiroshima University, where I provided a talk on this trip, is #67 in Asia.  In Thailand, I did not expect King Mongkut's University of Technology (#55) and Mahidol University (#61) to be rated higher than Chulalongkorn University (#82).

Should we be worried that our once overwhelming superiority in higher education is being challenged? Yes, of course, but consider that those three rankings above come from the United Kingdom and China.  I suspect if "Americans" controlled a review system, we'd look better.  In any case, the world is catching up.  However, you don't need to lose too much sleep over our poor K-12 performance.  We set those low budget priorities a long time ago and well survived.  The USA will remain the dominant world power for the next century, if not well into the next millennium.

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