2010 ARWU College Ranking

Sparkeye7
Fri, 13 Aug 2010 10:50:50 +0000

Why British Universities don’t attract China’s best

By Peter Foster World Last updated: August 13th, 2010

Britain and Europe have fared dismally again in an annual Chinese ranking of top international universities. Should we be concerned? I think we should, and here’s why.

According to the list compiled by Shanghai’s Jiaotong University, the United States accounts for a staggering 54 of the top 100 institutions, with Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford and MIT taking the top four slots.

Cambridge comes in 5th and Oxford 10th, however this can’t obscure the fact that when it comes to first-choice places to study for the brightest Chinese, the US is trouncing Europe.

Europe protests that these rankings, which are heavily skewed towards science, are not a good measure of merit, but that misses the fact that they reveal the attitudes and priorities of top Chinese looking to study abroad and a fundamental weakness in the UK higher education system.

According to a British-Australian economics Phd candidate that I’ve been talking to at Peking University (China’s equivalent of Oxbridge) all the really top students want to go the US to study. And they wouldn’t be seen dead in the UK.

The reason is partly economic: with their massive endowments US universities can afford to fund places for the best candidates in order to attract the very best to their research programmes. Their focus is all about merit, not money.

By contrast, British institutions are seen to be using foreign students as a cash-cow to be mercilessly milked, subsidising the fees of homegrown students and shoring up their books at a time when funding is being cut by central government.

Among her classmates, she says, the overwhelming perception is that the students who go to UK universities are the children of the rich and politically well-connected who couldn’t quite cut it at the top level and win scholarships to the US.

For the very top Chinese students, who have succeeded in the toughest and most elitist selection programme in the world, to go to a British or Australian university, is she adds damningly, to “throw out the very elitism their genius had helped them attain.”

Britain congratulates itself on the number of Chinese students visiting – education as a whole is worth 20bn pounds to the UK economy in 2009 – but it is failing to realise that it’s actually getting China’s second string. Not dummies, for sure, but not the cream either.

In a global economy where developed countries can never compete on cost, surviving only on keeping their technological edge, this is a very dangerous path to be embarking on.

“The UK university system think they are so great because so many Chinese are coming, but they don’t see which Chinese are coming,” says my woman in the quadrangle.

By using foreign students as a source of funding first, and excellence second, we are “risking our global standing for the sake of cheaper degrees for the locals.”

In her view, we are in a race to the bottom.


How UK universities fared in the Jiaotong Top 100: Cambridge (5) Oxford (10) University College London (21) Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine (26) University of Manchester (44) University of Edinburgh (54) King’s College London (63) University of Bristol (66) University of Nottingham (84) University of Sheffield (88) University of Birmingham (99).


Source: [Why British Universities don’t attract China’s best – Telegraph Blogs](http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peterfoster/100050574/why-british-universities-dont-attract-chinas-best/)