Timeline for Why are most of the top universities American?
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9 events
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| Oct 13, 2015 at 10:06 | comment | added | user38309 | @O.R.Mapper To an extent, sure; although I think a large factor in these countries' success is the number of faculty who are fluent in both Chinese and English (for maximizing the talent pool from which to draw). Interestingly, Russia has just opened an English-language technical university (Innopolis), suggesting that there is a common perception that one can attract more international talent if the working language is primarily English. | |
| Oct 11, 2015 at 19:19 | comment | added | O. R. Mapper | @schester: With Hong Kong and especially Singapore somehow being English-speaking, too, of course. | |
| Oct 11, 2015 at 18:08 | comment | added | Jouni Sirén | Cities named Cambridge have even more top-100 universities per capita. That's why it's important to look only at regions with sufficiently high population, in order to avoid bias caused by arbitrary administrative borders, historical/geographical coincidences, and random chance. | |
| Oct 11, 2015 at 17:46 | comment | added | user38309 | But with normalization, Switzerland, Netherlands, Singapore, and Hong Kong (and perhaps others) all have more top-100 universities per capita than the English-speaking countries do. | |
| Oct 11, 2015 at 17:23 | comment | added | Jouni Sirén | Without normalization, the question would be meaningless. It would just be the equivalent of asking why almost all top universities are outside Australia. With normalization, we can at least try to see the big picture by looking at regions that are large enough and somehow comparable. We can see, for example, that the rich English-speaking countries are overrepresented, when compared to the rich non-English Europe or the rich parts of East Asia. | |
| Oct 11, 2015 at 17:06 | comment | added | user38309 | Well, if one measures the performance of countries by top-100 universities per capita, then Switzerland and Australia outperform both the UK and the US (with 4 universities and 8 million people and 7 universities versus 23 million people, respectively). I'm not sure how reliable per-capita normalization is for universities, given the international nature of academia. | |
| Oct 11, 2015 at 16:42 | comment | added | Jouni Sirén | In that ranking, the UK has one top-100 university for every 3.6 million people and the US has one for every 10.6 million people. For Japan and China, the numbers are 25.5 million and 170 million, respectively. That sounds quite rare. Small countries/administrative areas such as Singapore and Hong Kong are isolated success stories that rely on being far more developed than their surroundings. | |
| Oct 11, 2015 at 16:13 | comment | added | user38309 | Top Asian universities are not rare; perhaps it depends on which ranking you are using. The 2015 QS Rankings list NUS at 12th, NTU at 13th, Tsinghua at 25th, HKUST at 28th, University of Hong Kong at 30th... | |
| Oct 11, 2015 at 13:24 | history | answered | Jouni Sirén | CC BY-SA 3.0 |