University of California Riverside:Is it America's Fastest Rising University?

Not really.

It seems that one major function of rankings is to cover up the decline or stagnation of major western universities. An example is the University of California Riverside (UCR), a leading public institution. 

Recently there was a tweet and a web page extolling UCR as "America's fastest rising university" on the strength of its ascent in four different rankings: Forbes 80 places in two years, US News 33 places in two years, Times Higher Education (THE) 83 places in two years and the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR) 41 places in one year.

This surprised me a bit because I was under the impression that the University of California system had been declining in the research-based rankings and that UCR had not done so well in the THE world rankings. So I had a quick look. In 2019-20 UCR was in the 251-300 band in the THE world rankings. Two years before that it  was 198th and in 2010-11 it was 117th. I have little trust in THE but that is evidence of a serious decline by any standards. 

But it seems that the tweeter was thinking about the THE/Wall Street Journal US Teaching Rankings. In 2019-20 Riverside was 189th there, in 2018-19 212th, in 2017-18 272nd, and in 2016-17 it was 364th.

That is definitely a substantial rise and it is rather impressive considering the this rise occurred while the UCR was falling in THE's world rankings. Most of the rise occurred in the outcomes "pillar" and probably was a result of the introduction in 2018 of a new indicator that measured student debt. 

UCR's rise had nothing to do with resources, environment or engagement. It is not possible to disentangle the components within THE's four pillars but it is a very plausible hypothesis that a good part of UCR's success is the result of a methodological change that introduced an element where this university was especially strong.

Another ranking where UCR does well is the Center for World University Ranking now published in the UAE. Last year  UCR was 204th, in 2018-19  245th, and in 2017-18 218th. 

The fall and rise of UCR over two years follows the weighting given to research. When the weighting was 25% UCR's position was 218th. When the research weighting was increased to 70 % UCR fell to 245th. When it fell to 50% UCR rose to 204th. So, here again UCR's rank is dependent on methodological tweaking. It does well when the weighting for research is reduced and less well when it is increased.

I assume that the US News (USN) rankings refer to America's Best Colleges, where UCR does very well. It was 91st last year among national universities and 1st for social mobility. 

The rise of UCR in these rankings is also the result of methodological changes. In 2019 USN began to shift away from academic excellence to social mobility, which basically means admitting and graduating  larger numbers of recognised and protected groups. The acceptance rate criterion has been scrapped and metrics related to social mobility such as the graduation rates of low income students have been introduced. UCR has not necessarily improved: what has happened is that the ranking has put more weight on things that it is good at and less on those where it performs less well.

The Forbes ranking also refers to changes announced in 2017 that "better align this list with what FORBES values most: entrepreneurship, success, impact and the consumer experience." It is  likely that these had a favourable impact on UCR's performance here as well.

When it comes to international research based rankings over several years the story is a different one of steady decline. Starting with total publications in the publications indicator of the CWTS Leiden Ranking, UCR went from 270th in 2006-09 to 392nd in 2014-17. Much of this was due to the general decline of American universities but even within the US group there was a decline from 88th to 93rd.

The decline is starker if we look at the most rigorous expression of quality, the proportion of publications in the top 1% of journals. In the same period UCR fell from 12th to 130th worldwide and 11th to 59th in the USA.

Turning to the Scimago Institution Rankings which include patents and altmetrics, Riverside fell from 151st in 2011 to 228th in 2019. Among US institutions it fell from  70th  in 2011 to 85th in 2019.

That is the situation with regard to research based rankings. Moving on the rankings that include things related to teaching UCR fell from 271st in the QS world rankings in 2017 to 454th in 2020. In the Round University Rankings it fell from 197th in 2010 to 231st in 2916 and then stopped participating from 2017 onward.

It seems fairly clearly that UCR has been in declining in indicators relating to research, especially research of the highest quality. It also performs poorly in those rankings that combine teaching withresearch and internationalisation metrics. Exactly why must wait for another post but I strongly suspect that the underlying reason is the declining ability of incoming students and the retreat from meritocracy in graduate school admissions and faculty appointments and promotions.

Polish Universities in International Rankings

My short article on Polish universities and international rankings has just been published by Forum Akademikie. The article in Polish can be accessed here. Translation and editing by Piotr Kieracinski. The full journal issue is here.

Here is the English version.

Richard Holmes

Polish Universities and International Rankings

A Brief History of International University Rankings

After a false start with the Asiaweek rankings of 1999-2000, international university rankings took off in 2003 with the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), published by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and then by the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy.

In 2004 two new rankings appeared: the Ranking Web of Universities, better known as Webometrics, which originally measured only web activity, and the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) – Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings, which emphasised research and also included faculty resources and internationalisation indicators.

Since then the number of rankings, metrics and data points has increased prompting ranking consultant Daniel Guhr to talk about “vast data lakes”. Rankings have become more complex and sophisticated and often use statistical techniques such as standardisation and field normalisation.

In addition to global rankings, specialist rankings of regions, subjects, and business schools have appeared. International rankings continue to have a bias towards research but some try to find a way of capturing data that might be relevant to teaching and learning or to university third missions such as sustainability, gender equity and open access. They have also become significant in shaping national higher education policy and institutional strategy.

Although the media usually talk about the big four rankings or sometimes the big three or big two, there are now many more. The IREG Inventory of International Rankings includes 17 global rankings in addition to regional and specialised rankings and various spin offs. Since the publication of the inventory more global rankings have appeared and no doubt there are more to come.

Media Perceptions of Rankings

It is unfortunate that the media and public perception of global rankings has little relation to reality. The Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings are by far the most prestigious but they have serious defects. They lack transparency with eleven indicators bundled into three broad groups. They rely on subjective surveys and questionable data submitted by institutions. They are unbalanced with a 30% weighting going towards a citation indicator that can be influenced by a handful of papers in a multi-author international project and that has elevated a succession of little-known places to world research leadership. These include the University of Reykjavik, Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, Aswan University, and Anglia Ruskin University.

The problems of the THE world rankings are illustrated by looking at the fate of a leading Polish university in recent editions. In the 2014-15 rankings the University of Warsaw was ranked 301-350 but in 2015-16 it fell to 501-600. This was entirely the result of a dramatic fall in the score for citations and that was entirely the result of a methodological change. In 2015 THE stopped counting citations to papers with over a thousand “authors”. This badly affected the University of Warsaw which, along with Warsaw University of Technology, had been contributing to the Large Hadron Collider project a producer of many such papers. The University of Warsaw’s decline in the rankings had nothing to do with any defect. It was simply the result of THE’s tweaking.

Although they receive little attention from the media there are now several global rankings published by universities and research councils that include more universities, cover a broader range of indicators and are technically as good as or better than the Big Four. These include the National Taiwan University Rankings, University Ranking by Academic Performance published by Middle East Technical University, the Scimago Institution Rankings and CWTS Leiden Ranking.

Polish Universities in Global Rankings

Turning to the current position of Polish universities in international rankings there is a great deal of variation. There are 14 in the THE rankings with 4 in the top 1000, but 410 in the Webometrics rankings of which 10 are in the top 1000. The ranking with the best representation of Polish universities is Scimago with 54 in the top 1000.

Of the “big four” rankings -- THE, QS, Shanghai, US News -- the best for analysing the current standing of the International Visibility Project (IntVP) universities is the US News Best Global Universities (BGU). THE and QS are unbalanced with too much emphasis on a single indicator, citations and academic survey respectively. The Shanghai rankings include Nobel and Fields awards some of which are several decades old. It should be noted that BGU is an entirely research based ranking.

The list below indicates the world rank of Polish universities in the latest US News BGU:

University of Warsaw 286

Jagiellonian University 343

Warsaw University of Technology 611

AGH University of Science and Technology 635

Adam Mickiewicz University 799

University of Wroclaw 833

Medical University of Wroclaw 926

Wroclaw University of Science and Technology 961

Nicholas Copernicus University 984

Medical University of Gdansk 995

Medical University of Warsaw 1033

University of Silesia 1082

University of Gdansk 1096

University of Lodz 1119

Gdansk University of Technology 1148

Poznan University of Technology 1148

Lodz University of Technology 1194

Lodz Medical University 1203

Warsaw University of Life Sciences 1221

Maria Curie-Sklodowska University 1303

Pomeranian Medical University 1303  

Poznan University of Medical Sciences 1312

Silesian University of Technology 1351

Krakow University of Technology   1363

University of Warmia 1363

Medical University Silesia    1399

Medical University of Lublin 1414

University of Rseszov 1430

Technical University Czestochowa 1445

Poznan University of Life Sciences 1457

Wroclaw University of Life and Environmental Sciences 1465

Agricultural University of Lublin. No overall rank. 214 for agriculture

Medical University of Bialystok. No overall rank. 680 for clinical medicine.

One thing that emerges from this list is that the Polish university system suffers from a serious handicap in this ranking and in others due to the existence of independent specialist universities of technology, business and medicine. Consolidation of small specialist institutions could bring about significant improvements as has recently happened in France.

There is also some variation in the rank of the best performing Polish universities. In most rankings the top scoring Polish university is in the 300s or 490s. There are, however, some exceptions. The default indicator in Leiden Ranking, total publications, has Jagiellonian University at 247, GreenMetric has Adam Mickiewicz University at 160 and the Moscow Three Missions University Rankings puts the University of Warsaw at 113. On the other hand, no Polish university gets higher than the 600-800 band in the THE world rankings.

The various rankings have very different methodologies and indicators. THE for example includes income in three indicators. The QS rankings gave a combined weighting of 50 % to reputation surveys. Scimago counts patents and the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR), now based in the Arab Gulf, the achievements of alumni. It would be a good idea to look carefully at the content and format of all the rankings before using them for evaluation or benchmarking.

Polish Universities: Strengths and Weaknesses

Poland has certain advantages with regard to international rankings. It has an excellent secondary school system as shown by above average performance in PISA and other international standardised tests. Current data indicates that it has adequate teaching resources, shown by statistics for staff student ratio. It has cultural and economic links to the East, with the Anglosphere and within the EU that are likely in the future to produce fruitful research partnerships and networks.

On the other hand, the evidence of current rankings is that Polish universities relatively underfunded and that doctoral education is still relatively limited. The reputation for research in the world is not very high although is better for regional reputation.

One exception to the limited international visibility of Polish universities is a recent British film, The Last Passenger, in which a hijacked train is saved by a few heroes one of whom has an engineering degree from Gdansk University of Technology.

Poland and the Rankings

It would be unwise for Poland, or indeed any country, to focus on a single ranking. Some rankings have changed their methodology and will probably continue to do so and this might lead to unexpected rises or falls. THE has announced that there will be a new 3.0 version of the world rankings towards the end of this year.

Any university or university system wishing to engage with the rankings should be aware that they often favour certain types of institutions. The Shanghai rankings, for example, privilege medical research and totally ignore the arts and humanities. Scimago includes data about patents which would give technological universities an advantage. THE’s current methodology gives a massive privilege to participants in multi-contributor projects. QS uses several channels to obtain respondents for its academic and employer surveys. One of these is a list of potential respondents provided by the universities. Universities are very likely to nominate those who are likely to support them in the surveys. 

Guidelines for Polish universities as they seek to establish and extend their international presence.

First, improving international visibility will take time. Quick fixes such as recruiting highly cited adjunct faculty or taking part in high profile projects may be counterproductive, especially if there is an unannounced change in methodology.

Second, before launching a campaign to rise in the global rankings some universities might consider regional or specialist rankings first, such as the THE Europe Teaching Rankings, the QS graduate employability ranking, the Indonesian GreenMetric rankings or business school rankings.

Third, Universities should also consider the cost of taking part in the rankings. US News, QS and THE require universities to submit data and this can be time consuming especially for THE which asks for data in ten subjects. Many universities seem to need three or four staff dedicated to rankings.

Fourth, it would be wise to monitor all international rankings for data that can be used for internal evaluation or publicity.

Fifth, universities should match their profiles, strengths and weaknesses with the methodology of specific rankings. Universities with strengths in medical research might perform well in the Shanghai rankings.

Sixth, it is not a good idea to focus exclusively on any single ranking or to make any one ranking the standard of excellence.

1.      

Boycotting the Shanghai Rankings?

John Fitzgerald of Swinburne University of Technology has written an article in the Journal of Political Risk that argues that Western universities should boycott, that is not participate in or refer to, the Shanghai rankings in order to show opposition to the current authoritarian trend in Chinese higher education.

There seems a bit of selective indignation at work here. China is hardly the only country in the world with authoritarian governments, ideologically docile universities, or crackdowns on dissidents. Nearly everywhere in Africa, most of the Middle East, Russia, much of Eastern Europe, and perhaps India would seem as guilty as China, if not more so.

American and other Western universities themselves are in danger of becoming one party institutions based on an obsessive hatred of Trump or Brexit, a pervasive cult of "diversity", political tests for admission, appointment and promotion, and periodic media or physical attacks on dissenters or those who associate with dissenters. 

Perhaps academics should boycott the THE or other rankings to protest the treatment by Cambridge University of Noah Carl or Jordan Peterson? 

One way of resisting the wave of repression, according to Professor Fitzgerald, is to "no longer reference the ARWU rankings or participate in the Shanghai Jiaotong rankings process which risks spreading the Chinese Communist Party's university model globally. Universities that continue to participate or reference the Shanghai rankings should be tasked by their faculty and alumni to explain why they are failing to uphold the principles of free inquiry and institutional autonomy as fiercely as Xi Jinping is undermining them."

It is hard to see what Fitzgerald means by not participating in the Shanghai rankings. The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) uses publicly available data from western sources, the Web of Science, Nature, Science, the Clarivate Analytics list of Highly Cited Researchers, and Nobel and Fields awards. Universities cannot avoid participating in them. They can denounce and condemn the rankings until their faces turn bright purple but they cannot opt out. They are ranked by ARWU whether they like it or not. 

As for referencing, presumably citing the Shanghai rankings or celebrating university achievements there, Fitzgerald's proposals would seem self defeating. The rankings actually understate the achievements of leading Chinese universities. In the latest ARWU Tsinghua University and Peking University are ranked 43rd and 53rd. The QS World University Rankings puts them 16th and 22nd and the THE world rankings 23rd and 24th. 

If anyone wanted to protest the rise of Chinese universities they should turn to the QS and THE rankings where they do well because of reputation, income (THE), and publications in high status journals. It is also possible to opt out of the THE rankings simply by not submitting data.

If oppressive policies did affect the quality of research produced by Chinese universities this would be more likely to show up in the Shanghai rankings through the departure of highly cited researchers or declining submissions to Nature or Science than in the THE or QS rankings where a decline would be obscured if reputation scores continued to hold steady.

Fitzgerald's proposals are pointless and self defeating and ascribe a greater influence to rankings than they actually have.

The decline of standardised testing

Over the last few years there has been a trend in American higher education to reduce the significance of standardised tests -- SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT -- in university admissions. A large number of institutions have gone test optional, meaning that it is up to students whether or not they submit their scores. Those who do not submit will not be rejected but will be assessed by other criteria such as high school grades and ranks, recommendations, social awareness, grit, coping with adversity, leadership, sports, membership of protected groups, and so on.

Most test optional schools are small liberal arts colleges but recently they were joined by the University of Chicago, an elite university by any standards.

Going test optional has a number of advantages. Students with low test scores will be more likely to apply and that will lower the percentage of applicants admitted which will make the universities look more selective. It could also help with the rankings which may at first sight seem a bit of a paradox. US News has declared that for the America's Best Colleges rankings up to 25% of applicants can withhold their SAT or ACT scores without the college being penalised.

It seems that if universities can arrange to admit 75% of applicants wholly or partly on the basis of their test scores and allow another quarter to be admitted because of a "holistic" assessment then they may suffer a measurable fall in the average academic ability of their students but not enough to get in trouble with the rankers or to undermine their reputation for academic excellence.

It seems likely that US News will continue to adjust its rankings to accommodate the test optional trend, Recently, for example, the ranking of online graduate education courses lowered the threshold for full credit for quantitative and verbal GRE scores from 75% to 25%  of admitted students. The justification for this is that "although many ranked programs with selective admissions made use of GRE scores in limited circumstances very often submitting these scores was optional or waived for applicants."


This will lead to the problem of a substantial number of students being admitted with significantly lower test scores or without taking the tests and so the gap between the most and least able students is likely to widen. Many of those admitted without submitting scores will suffer a serious blow to their self respect as they go from being the academic super stars of their high school or undergraduate program to ranking at the bottom of any assessed test or assignment.

There will accordingly be pressure on colleges and graduates schools to relax grading standards, give credit for group work, allow students to repeat courses, mandate contextualised assessment policies, hold instructors responsible for the performance of students. Faculty who talk about the decline in standards or disparities in achievement will be disciplined and ostracised.

The significant thing about standardised tests is that they correlate quite highly with general intelligence or cognitive ability and also with each other. They played a significant role in the growth of American higher education and research in the twentieth century and the transformation of the Ivy league from a place for producing literate and well behaved young gentlemen into intellectual powerhouses that contributed to the economic and scientific dominance of the US in the second half of the twentieth century.

They are also a good predictor of academic performance although perhaps not quite as good by themselves as high school grades which are influenced by conscientiousness and social conformity. 

It now seems likely that there will be increasing pressure to get rid of standardised tests altogether. In California there is a court case in process to make it illegal to used tests for university admissions and Carol Christ, Chancellor of the University of California (UC) Berkeley, has declared in favour of abolition.

Getting rid of tests will mean getting rid of an objective measure of students' intelligence and academic ability. Grades are, as noted above, a slightly better predictor overall of academic performance but there are contexts where tests can add vital information to the admission process. Grade inflation throughout US high schools is creating a large number of students with perfect or near perfect grades but with huge differences in cognitive skills. Without tests there will be no way of distinguishing the truly capable from the diligently mediocre or the aggressively conformist.

If  UC does stop using the SAT or ACT for admissions it is unlikely that it will institute a policy of open admissions, at least not yet. It is more probable they it will shift the criteria for selection to high school grades, teachers' recommendations, group membership, and unsupervised personal essays. The consequences of selection though inflatable high school grades and other subjective measures will almost certainly be a significant decline in the average cognitive skills of students at currently selective universities.

American universities will probably become more representative of the ethnic, gender and racial structure of America or the world, more conscientious, more extroverted, more socially aware. Perhaps this will be compensation for the decline in cognitive ability.

It is unlikely that the levelling process will end there. In the years to come there will very probably be demands that universities stop using high school grades or admission essays or anything else that shows a social or racial gap. Studies will be cited showing that wealthy white parents help their children with homework or drive them to volunteering activities or pay for sports equipment or get professional advice about their diversity essays. 

Ultimately there will be a situation where American universities  see a noticeable decline in the academic and cognitive ability of students and graduates in comparison with China and the Chinese diaspora, Japan, Korea, Russia and Eastern Europe and maybe India. Almost certainly this will be attributed by educational experts to the stinginess of federal and state authorities.

Perhaps there will come another Sputnik moment when America  realises that it has fallen behind its competitors. If so it will probably be too late. 

Sometimes Nice Guys Finish First for Something: the Case of Dartmouth College

There is a crisis approaching for the universities of the global North. A fundamental problem is that declining or stagnant birth rates are reducing the number of potential students, especially in North America, and that will eventually undermine their economic viability. See this article in Inside Higher Ed for the situation in the US.

The options seem to be limited. Universities could downsize and reduce the numbers of staff and students and, at elite US institutions, spending on country club facilities and an ever expanding army of administrators. They could revise their missions by offering fewer graduate courses, especially in the humanities and social sciences, and more vocational programs.

There seems, however, to be little appetite at the moment for such measures. Many universities are trying to maintain income and size by recruiting from abroad. For a while it appeared that western universities would be saved by thousands of international, mainly Chinese, students. But now it looks like fewer Chinese will be coming and there seems to be no substitute in sight. European universities got excited about Middle Eastern refugees filling the empty seats in lecture halls but then it turned out that most lacked the linguistic and cognitive skills for higher education.

The problem is exacerbated by the general decline or flatlining of cognitive skills of potential students, measured by PISA scores or standardized tests. There have been various hypotheses about the cause: smart phones, too much screen time, immigration, dysgenic fertility, inadequate teaching methods, lack of funding, institutional racism and sexism, toxic Trumpism. But, whatever the cause there seems little hope of a recovery any time soon.

Business schools appear to be part of this trend. MBA students tend to be highly mobile and they are not limited to choosing, as many US undergraduates are,  between a community college, the local state university and a struggling private college. Faced with competition from European and Asian schools and online courses, soaring costs and declining applications, many US business schools are at best treading water and at worst in serious danger of drowning.

Dartmouth College, a venerable Ivy League school, is no exception. Back in 2014 it reported the biggest drop in applications in 21 years. Although the college continues to hold its place in the US News Best Colleges rankings it has fallen in the Shanghai rankings, suggesting that it is failing to attract leading researchers as well as talented students.

Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business has suffered as much or more than the rest of the institution. In 2011 it was first in the Economist's Full Time MBA ranking and second in 2012, starting a steady decline until 2019 when it was twelfth.

In 2018 Tuck tried to reverse the steady decline by adopting a new approach to admissions. It was not enough for Tuck students  to be smart, accomplished and aware. They have to be nice. 

Back in my days in grammar school my English teacher would be outraged by the use of that word. But standards have changed. 

How to measure niceness? By an essay and a referee's report. One does not have to be excessively cynical to see that there is obvious room for gaming and bias here. Their is a  large amount of writing and talking about coaching for standardized tests, none about whether essays like these have the any real authenticity or validity.

But perhaps I am being too cynical. Maybe Dartmouth's business school has done something right. The latest THE business and economics subject rankings puts Dartmouth 44th in the world for business and economics, which is very creditable, ahead of Boston University,  Zhejiang, Edinburgh and Johns Hopkins..

With THE whenever there is a surprisingly high overall score it is a good idea to check the citations indicator which is supposedly a measure of research impact or influence. Sure enough, Dartmouth is second in the world for citations in business and economics just behind Central South University in China and just ahead of Peter the Great St Petersburg polytechnic University.

Could it be that all that niceness is somehow radiating out from the Tuck and causing researchers around the world to cite Dartmouth articles? 

When will Tsinghua Overtake Harvard?

One of the most interesting trends in higher education over the last few years is the rise of China and the relative decline of the USA.

Winston Churchill said the empires of the future will be empires of the mind. If that is so then this century will very likely be the age of Chinese hegemony. Chinese science is advancing faster than that of the USA on all or nearly all fronts. Unless we count things like critical race theory or queer studies.

This is something that should show up in the global rankings if we track them over at least a few years. So, here is a comparison of the top two universities in the two countries according to indicators of research output and research quality over a decade.

Unfortunately, most international rankings are not very helpful in this respect. Few of the current ones provide data for a decade or more. QS and THE have seen frequent changes in methodology and THE's citation indicator although charmingly amusing is not useful unless you think that Aswan University, Anglia Ruskin University and the University of Peradeniya are world beaters for research impact. Two helpful rankings here are Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), and Leiden Ranking.

Let's compare the comparative performance of Tsinghua University and Harvard in the Shanghai Ranking's indicator of research output, papers over a one year period, excluding arts and humanities. The published scores are derived from the square roots of the raw data with the top scorer getting a score of 100.

In 2009 Harvard's score  was 100 while that for Tsinghua was 55.8. In 2019 it was 100 for Harvard and 79.5 for Tsinghua. So the gap is closing 2.37 points every year. At that rate it would take about nine years for Tsinghua to catch up so look out for 2028.

Of course, this is quantity not quality so take a look at another indicator, Highly Cited Researchers. This is a moderately gamable metric and I suspect that Shanghai might have to abandon it one day but it captures the willingness and ability of universities to sponsor research of a high quality. In 2009 Tsinghua's score was zero compared to Harvard's 100. In 2019 it is 37.4. If everything continues at the same rate Tsinghua will overtake Harvard in another 17 years.

Looking at the default indicator in Leiden Ranking, total publications, in 2007-10 Tsinghua was 35% of Harvard and in 2014-17 56%. Working from that Tsinghua would achieve parity in 2029-33, in the rankings published in 2035.

Looking at a measure of research quality, publications in the top 10% of journals, Tsinghua was 15% of Harvard in 2007-10 and 34% in 2014-17.  From that, Tsinghua should reach parity  in 2038-42. in the rankings published in 2044, assuming Leiden is still following its current methodology.

So it looks like Tsinghua will reach parity in  research output in a decade or a decade or a decade and a half and high quality research in a decade and a half or two decades and a half.

Using Webometrics to Rank University Systems

Recently there has been some interest in ranking higher education systems in addition to institutions or departments. See here and here.  But both of these efforts, from Universitas 21 and QS, rank only 50 countries.

The Webometrics rankings attempt to cover every university in the world or anything that might conceivably claim to be a university, institute or college. The indicators comprise web activity and research output. So, there is data here to create a simple and comprehensive  ranking of countries. Below is the list of countries and territories ranked according to the world rank of the highest ranked university. If the Webometrics methodology remains unchanged it will be updated twice a year.

The table is not very surprising overall but it is worth noting that the leading Asian countries are already in the top ten and that Brazil and Mexico  are not too far behind. The performance of Arab countries is not too impressive even if they are rich in oil.

It's a safe bet that the highest ranked Chinese university will rise steadily over the next few years followed by South Korea and Singapore, but probably not Hong Kong and Australia.

Rank	Country	Rank of highest ranked university
1	USA	1
2	UK	7
3	Canada	19
4	Switzerland	32
5	China	33
6	Hong Kong	45
7	Australia	46
8	Singapore	50
9	Netherlands	63
10	Japan	69
11	Brazil	74
12	Denmark	76
13	Belgium	78
14	Finland	87
15	Norway	93
16	Germany	97
17	Sweden	106
18	Taiwan	111
19	South Korea	116
20	Italy	120
21	Spain	133
22	Mexico	141
23	Austria	150
24	New Zealand	153
25	Israel	157
26	Czech Republic	204
27	Portugal	208
28	Greece	224
29	Russia	226
30	Argentina	228
31	Ireland	230
32	South Africa	274
33	France	292
34	Chile	323
35	Malaysia	352
36	Argentina	372
37	Poland	388
38	Saudi Arabia	415
39	Iran	417
40	Estonia	440
41	Serbia	464
42	India	471
43	Turkey	475
44	Thailand	513
45	Iceland	533
46	Hungary	563
47	Egypt	602
48	Colombia	614
49	Croatia	619
50	Luxembourg	631
51	Puerto Rico	649
52	Belarus	684
53	Cyprus	700
54	Macau	720
55	Slovakia	732
56	Lithuania	750
57	Indonesia	771
58	Costa Rica	844
59	Malta	866
60	Romania	881
61	Bulgaria	934
62	Jamaica	953
63	Qatar	958
64	Peru	971
65	Kenya	987
66	Vietnam	1013
67	Slovenia	1103
68	Latvia	1106
69	Uganda	1129
70	Jordan	1149
71	UAE	1158
72	Philippines	1199
73	Ghana	1209
74	Nigeria	1233
75	Pakistan	1269
76	Ethiopia	1314
77	Oman	1346
78	Georgia	1423
79	Morocco	1515
80	North Macedonia	1569
81	Venezuela	1593
82	Ecuador	1638
83	Palestine	1646
84	Bosnia	1669
85	Kazakhstan	1793
86	Trinidad	1794
87	Iraq	1804
88	Brunei	1829
89	Fiji	1831
90	Bangladesh	1895
91	Tanzania	1913
92	Ukraine	1977
93	Sri Lanka	1981
94	Zimbabwe	2014
95	Algeria	2061
96	Cuba	2134
97	Bahrain	2161
98	Kuwait	2200
99	Mozambique	2280
100	Paraguay	2297
101	Mauritius	2422
102	Guatemala	2458
103	Uruguay	2499
104	Botswana	2583
105	Grenada	2583
106	Armenia	2643
107	Liechtenstein	2761
108	Montenegro	2878
109	Guam	2900
110	Sudan	2936
111	Bolivia	2960
112	Mongolia	2962
113	Benin	2980
114	Malawi	3001
115	Zambia	3001
116	Senegal	3008
117	Moldova	3151
118	Tunisia	3198
119	Rwanda	3220
120	Nepal	3243
121	Namibia	3316
122	Panama	3391
123	Cameroon	3527
124	Barbados	3538
125	Azerbaijan	3573
126	US Virgin Islands	3579
127	Syria	3593
128	Burkina Faso	3634
129	Dominica	3679
130	Honduras	3892
131	Uzbekistan	4017
132	Libya	4040
133	Yemen	4126
134	Faroe Islands	4368
135	Madagascar	4372
136	Togo	4392
137	Eswatini	4428
138	Laos	4431
139	Nicaragua	4458
140	El Salvador	4542
141	Kyrgyzstan	4554
142	French Polynesia	4640
143	Albania	4735
144	Monaco	4842
145	Dominican Republic	4903
146	Cambodia	5060
147	San Marino	5107
148	Papua New Guinee	5205
149	Greenland	5378
150	Afghanistan	5676
151	Lesotho	5872
152	Antigua	6040
153	Guyana	6149
154	Ivory Coast	6306
155	Anguilla	6374
156	Suriname	6641
157	Democratic Republic of the Congo	7033
158	American Samoa	7213
159	Myanmar	7221
160	Belize	7497
161	Micronesia	7962
162	Haiti	8082
163	Angola	8091
164	Bhutan	8159
165	Niger	8384
166	Sierra Leone	8560
167	Somalia	10154
168	St Kitts & Nevis	10527
169	Cape Verde	10685
170	Andorra	10772
171	Gambia	11020
172	Seychelles	11235
173	South Sudan	12329
174	Cayman Islands	13011
175	Samoa	13132
176	Bermuda	13431
177	British Virgin Islands	13694
178	Maldives	13864
179	Palau	13864
180	St Lucia	13981
181	Tajikistan	14180
182	Djibouti	14186
183	Central African Republic	14433
184	Northern Marianas	14444
185	Marshall Islands	15827
186	Gabon	16002
187	Aruba	16347
188	Solomon Islands	17867
189	Montserrat	18103
190	East Timor	18433
191	Guinea	18588
192	French Guiana	18703
193	Liberia	19463
194	Isle of Man	20029
195	Mali	20172
196	Mauretania	22144
197	Equatorial Guinea	23382
198	Niue	23892
199	Eritrea	24481
200	Turks & Caicos Islands	27918