There may be no surprises yet but they are clearly in the making.
Topped by Harvard University the world’s most prestigious universities remain in the West, predominantly in the United States and the United Kingdom.
According to Times Higher Education (THE) 2017 listing, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University are ranked second and third respectively while University of Cambridge and University of Oxford are tied as the fourth on the list of most respectable institutions of higher learning.
But, as noted by the THE, “leading universities in Asia are now considered more prestigious among top academics than many distinguished Western institutions.”
China’s Tsinghua University makes it to the top 15 for the first time, while Peking University makes its debut in the top 20. Both climbed several notches above their previous standings.
THE says the two Chinese universities overtake some leading universities in the United States and the United Kingdom.
The World Reputation Rankings are based on an invitation-only opinion survey of senior, published academics, who were asked to name no more than 15 universities that they believe are the best for research and teaching in their field, based on their own experience.
However, THE says, the results of the latest THE World University Rankings, suggest that there is a gap between the perceived and actual performance of the continent’s top universities.
Asia’s universities do not feature as highly in this list, despite recent improvements, it says.
Here is how THE explains the point in a news release:
Simon Marginson, director of the Centre for Global Higher Education at the UCL Institute of Education, said that there is “no doubt that the reputation of China’s top two universities has run ahead of their actual achievements”.
“The achievements are remarkable but uneven. In terms of high citation research in mathematics and complex computing, Tsinghua is now number one in the world, ahead of MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], and it is fourth in physical sciences and engineering. Yet Tsinghua is much less strong in research in medicine, [the] social sciences and humanities,” he said.
But Professor Marginson rejected the notion that China’s universities have been overhyped and predicted that the performance of the country’s top institutions will soon catch up with their growing prestige.
“Such is the rate of improvement that their reputation today is likely to be chased down by their real performance tomorrow,” he said.
Zhou Zhong, associate professor in comparative and international education at Tsinghua University, said that China’s determination to develop world-class universities through a number of excellence initiatives since the 1980s is a key factor in its success.
He added that Tsinghua’s rising reputation was partly due to several major “scientific and technological breakthroughs in recent years”, which have “drawn wide attention across the world to some of Tsinghua’s core strengths in big science”.
“Improved research infrastructure and, very strategically, the newly developed tenure system have all helped to both pull and push the academics to develop a publish or perish culture,” he said
