EVIDENCE IS EMERGING OF A decline in the power of US universities in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2014-2015, despite the California Institute of Technology’s claim on the top spot for the fourth consecutive year. The west coast institution heads a Top 10 for 2014-15 that still consists almost entirely of US-based universities, with only the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and Imperial College, London preventing a clean sweep.
But despite the fact that Harvard, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton, the University of California, Berkeley and Yale all make the Top 10, there’s evidence of an overall decline for US universities, with significant losses further down the league table. The US has 74 universities in the top 200, down from 77 last year. Some 60 percent of these institutions rank lower than they did 12 months ago, with an average fall of 5.34 places per university.
Conversely, the leading Asian institutions continue to rise, and the continent now has 24 universities in the world Top 200, four more than last year. Two Asian universities make the world Top 25 (the University of Tokyo and National University of Singapore), while six feature among the Top 50.
“Western universities, in many cases starved of vital public funding, are losing ground,” says Phil Baty, THE rankings editor, adding that there’s “something approaching a crisis” for US state institutions.
Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, says the “serious hit” in funding to the “great American public universities” has major implications for US science and competitiveness.
In Europe, Germany gains two new Top 200 representatives (Eberhard Karls Universitat Tubingen and Technische Universitat Dresden), to overtake the Netherlands as the third most represented nation behind the US and the UK.
The THE World University Rankings, powered by Thomson Reuters, use 13 performance indicators to examine universities’ strengths.
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)