US muscle reigns, but there’s a world of difference in value - University Rankings
‘Howard Hotson, professor of early modern intellectual history at the University of Oxford, who has become a prominent critic of the government’s higher education policy, said: “You can turn the data from the World University Rankings upside down and inside out…to measure different things; but the end results are more or less the same.
“Several small and prosperous countries - notably the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark - do best in per capita terms; the UK comes at or near the top of the value-for-money table; and Switzerland does exceptionally well across the board.
“The US, by contrast, offers unimpressive performance in per capita terms and very poor value for money.” He added: “Although many of the world’s very best universities are private, all the world’s best university systems are public…All this puts a fresh onus on the UK minister for universities and science - and on his counterparts in other countries - to provide equally clear and compelling evidence to justify radical market-driven reforms.”’
Times Higher Education, by John Morgan
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