Skip to footer

College rankings: Which countries have the best education systems?

A new higher education ranking focuses on evaluating quality by countries as a whole, as opposed to specific academic institutions. Universitas 21, an organization of 23 research universities across 15 countries, published its first ranking of countries “which are ‘best’ at providing higher education.”  Universitas 21’s report, published by the University of Melbourne in Australia, ranked 48 countries in all. Here are some of their findings:

How did Universitas 21 measure higher education?

  • By Whitney Eulich

The overall rankings for countries with the “best” higher education systems were calculated using four indicators, each of which held a different weight in the overall score. The weight each indicator is given in the final ranking reflects the authors’ “judgement about importance, modified by the availability and quality of the data.”

Resources: This variable takes into consideration government expenditure, research, and development expenditures, and total expenditures in colleges and universities. [25 percent of overall ranking]

Environment: The researchers took into consideration the transparency of higher education institutions, employment conditions, and level and diversity of funding.  Additionally, they researched the gender ratio for students as well as faculty, the country’s education regulatory environment, and the quality of data the host country collects on their tertiary educational institutions. [25 percent of overall ranking]

Connectivity: This was measured by the proportion of international students in higher education, as well as the proportion of publications co-authored with international collaborations. [10 percent of overall ranking]

Output: When looking at output, the researchers evaluated research disseminated by tertiary institutions, as well as its impact. They also considered the number of “world-class universities,” enrollment and graduation rates, as well as workforce readiness of graduates. [40 percent of overall ranking]

1 of 6
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.