Years ago, back in the dim and distant past that was 1993, I wrote a book about élitism in higher education in England called The Oxbridge Conspiracy. You can imagine the theme. I need hardly rehearse my arguments, which have been around ever since the two ancient universities were joined by others in the field, starting with the University of Durham (1832), then University College and King’s College, London, granted their royal charter in 1836.
There are now 109 universities and university colleges in England, and 130 in the UK as a whole, plus various specialist institutions that are, by definition, not “universal,” but enjoy equivalent academic status.
How good these are in global terms is a matter that is hotly debated, with the various league tables that appear each year keenly scrutinised for key indicators and – just as important – perceived status and employability.
The just-published QS World University Rankings, listing the global Top 1000, tells an all-too familiar tale, in which tradition, power and money combine to keep the same institutions in the leading positions year after year, decade after decade.
Here is the 2018 Top Ten:
1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
2 Stanford
3 Harvard
4 California Institute of Tehnology (Caltech)
5 Oxford
6 Cambridge
7 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH)
8 Imperial College, London
9 Chicago
10 University College, London (UCL)
The UK, you would have to say, comes out rather well from the study, claiming four out of the top ten places, only one less than the U.S., with five times our population and seven times our GDP. Further down the list, another 14 British universities figure in the Top 100, the highest placed, Edinburgh, taking the number 18 slot, with most of the obvious big city representatives, such as Bristol, Birmingham and Leeds, not that far behind. Warwick – actually located in Coventry – leads the provincial pack, storming home at number 54, comfortably ahead of its fashionable rivals, Exeter and York.
In 1993, just two years after Jacob Rees Mogg graduated with a 2:1 in history from Trinity College, Oxford, and 22 years after Jeremy Corbyn flounced out of the then North London Poly after a dispute over the nature of the curriculum, I was able to report that Oxford and Cambridge were safely up there in the Top Five, despite being riddled with snobbery and unfair practises. I was further able to conclude that England was home to at least a dozen other top institutions, including UCL, King’s College, Imperial and the LSE, as well as Durham, York, Exeter, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham. I could have added Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff and, at a pinch, Queen‘s University, Belfast, but these were outside my remit, as Celtic, not English, schools.
Not that much has changed in the years since. One surprise, to me at least, was the emergence towards the bottom end of the list of an institution I had never heard of, the Robert Gordon University, in Aberdeen, which apparently offers more than 300 courses to over 15,000 students from 120 countries on a £120 million campus completed in 2013. So well done, them.
The highest-placed French university in the QS list is Paris Sciences & Lettres (PSL), one of a raft of contradictorily named écoles normales supérieures, which just squeaks into the Top 50, some way behind the LSE (38) and the University of Manchester (29). The hugely competitive École Polytechnique, which describes itself as “at the cutting edge of science and technology,” comes in at 65, just four places ahead of the University of Glasgow. The mighty Sorbonne, which first opened its doors in 1253, when Louis IX was king, and styles itself “an exceptional centre of knowledge,” is rated joint 75th, alongside the University of Sheffield but one place behind Durham.
Surprisingly, you might think, Germany does not occupy an especially illustrious place in the academic firmament. The Technical University of Munich (TUM) is in 61st place, just ahead of the same city’s Ludwig-Maximilians University and the grandly-named one-time duelling academy, the Ruprecht-Karls Universität, in Heidelberg. Berlin’s Humboldt University is way down there in 121st place, nine ahead of the city’s Free University – “an outstanding, future-oriented institution in Germany’s world-renowned academic landscape”. In all, Europe’s most populous nation has 45 institutions in the Top 1000, ten more than France but well behind the 76 posted by the UK and the 157 of the U.S.
Japan holds 44 of the Top 1000 places, headed by the universities of Tokyo and Kyoto, but with 40 in the top flight it is China that is rising fastest up the rankings. Tsinghua University, founded in 1911, with ”discipline and excellence” as its motto, has achieved a remarkable 17th place in the latest rankings, with Peking University placed at 30 and Fudan (“heavenly light shines day after day”) 14 places further down. Expect to see more Chinese and Asian establishments breaking into the top 30 over the next ten years.
It is worth noting, as a justifiable point of pride, that on a per capita basis Britain has by some distance the largest number of top universities in the world. But hard cash, a rigorous secondary school system and the ability to attract foreign students, combined with a proven record in frontline research, are the keys to success in the twenty-first century. The question is, can we hold on to our lead or will cost-cutting and Brexit inexorably eat into our ability to stay ahead of the game?
