How and why Chinese universities threaten US cultural primacy
The 2022 ranking of the best universities in the world recorded, for the first time, the numerical overtaking of Chinese universities over American ones. Here are the causes and consequences. The article by Marco Orioles
If the cultural primacy of the USA – the famous stars and stripes soft power – is also attributable to the prestige of American universities, this strategic advantage is gradually eroding also due to the rise of Chinese universities, which in a recent ranking have even surpassed the US ones.
2022-2023 Best Global Universities rankings
In recent days, the US News & World Report, a leading institution in evaluating the performance of educational institutions, has published its new ranking of global universities, entitled Best Global Universities rankings .
The ranking, which includes 2,000 universities from over 90 countries, is drawn up taking into account factors such as academic research and reputation. Furthermore, this year, the results collected in cutting-edge areas such as artificial intelligence have been included among the evaluation criteria.
In the 2022-2023 ranking, Chinese universities overtook American ones for the first time: 338 Chinese universities appear in the ranking against 280 in the USA. Next in the ranking we find Japan with 105 institutes, Great Britain with 92 and India with 81.
If there has been overtaking, it has not however concerned the leading positions, firmly occupied by American universities, which conquer eight places in the top ten, which is as follows:
- Harvard University (US)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
- Stanford University (US)
- University of California–Berkeley (US)
- University of Oxford (UK)
- University of Washington–Seattle (US)
- Columbia University (US)
- University of Cambridge (UK)
- California Institute of Technology (US)
- Johns Hopkins University (US)
According to the Best Global Universities rankings, the most prestigious universities in China are Tsinghua University and Peking University, which climb several positions reaching 23rd and 39th place respectively.
As the China Daily enthusiastically observes in an article that highlights China's overtaking of the US, five of the top 10 best universities in terms of artificial intelligence studies are Chinese and among these there is still Tsinghua University.
Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2023
The slide is also recorded in another very popular ranking, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings , which evaluates and indexes the performance of 1,799 universities in 104 countries.
The 2023 edition notes the exit from the Top 100 of many American universities in contrast to what happens for the Chinese ones, which instead gain positions. It should be noted in particular that from 2018 to today the US universities in the Top 100 have dropped from 43 to 34, while the Chinese ones have dropped from 2 to 7.
Despite this change of balance, the primacy of US training institutions in the Top 10 remains unchanged, with the presence of 7 universities out of 10.
The ranking of the top ten universities is slightly different from that of US News & World Report, and is as follows:
- Oxford University (UK)
- Harvard University (US)
- University of Cambridge (UK)
- Stanford University (US)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
- California Institute of Technology (US)
- Princeton University (US)
- University of California Berkeley (US)
- Yale University (US)
- Imperial College London (UK)
The top Chinese universities on the list are tied in sixteenth position and are again Tsinghua University and Peking University, with a higher ranking than that attributed to them by US News & World Report. Five years ago both universities were below the thirtieth position.
The other five Chinese universities that make the Top 100 are Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhejiang University, University of Science and Technology of China and Nanjing University.
The reasons for overtaking
In an article dedicated to the recent changes in favor of China in university rankings, Fortune magazine tries to explore the reasons.
The first factor that is highlighted is the overtaking of China over the US in the number of "high impact" research: Chinese universities have not only completed more, but have also produced higher quality research.
An indicator in this sense is the number of the most cited papers globally, which sees China having a significant share of 1% of the most cited papers.
A second element recalled by Fortune is the number of patents produced: the share of international patents registered by Chinese universities rose from 16% in 2010 to 49% in 2020. In the same period of time, the US share dropped from 15 to 10 %.
A further factor is the part of the national budget earmarked for investment in research and development. In 2021 in America, spending in this sector fell to an all-time low in the last 70 years. This contrasts sharply with what happened in China, which made average annual spending increases of 10.6% between 2010 and 2019.
But the decline of US educational institutions can also be explained by their less attractiveness towards international students. As Fortune notes, according to the Oxford University Migration Observatory both American and British universities, two traditionally popular destinations for international students, have steadily lost market share between 2008 and 2019 in contrast to what happened in China, which is attracting more and more.
In conclusion of this review we report the statement of the chief knowledge officer of Times Higher Education, Phil Baty, who speaks of "very clear data: we are witnessing a real change in the balance of power in the global knowledge economy , to the detriment of the traditionally dominant Western world".
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/ranking-universita-stati-uniti-cina/ on Sun, 20 Nov 2022 07:23:07 +0000.