When major controversy over the appointment
to the post of the pro-vice-chancellor at the University of Hong Kong (HKU)
broke out in 2015, it coincided with the September publication of the QS World Univeristy Rankings (QS Rankings) showing that HKU’s academic ranking fell from Hong Kong’s
number 1 spot.
This inevitably led to claims that political
interference and eroding academic freedom somehow played in the drop in HKU’s
ratings. Although the compilers of the QS Rankings clarified later that recent
incidents would not have any impact on the rankings of universities in the 12
months prior to the publication of the results, suspicion over the link between
politics and academic standards are hard to dispel.
The author takes this opportunity to delve into
the underlying data of the QS Rankings and compare against a number of relevant
social and economic league tables and metrics to identify any correlation
between these factors and university rankings in general across the world.
Conclusion 1: Availability of resources
helps university rankings
It
should be common sense to link standard of education to the amount of resources
dedicated to the undertaking; for example, most people would naturally expect wealthy
countries to score highly in the university rankings. This relationship is
clearly demonstrated in Chart 1,
where the top university of countries (i.e. ranked number 1 in
It is clear from the chart above that rich countries such as the UK and USA have their top universities scoring highly within the global university community. Likewise, Hong Kong fits into the pattern with its high per capita income coinciding high scores for its top university.
in
the country) with higher per capita GDP tend to score higher in QS Rankings.
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Chart 1: QS Ranking of national
champions (no. 1 in each country) against per capita GDP
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It is clear from the chart above that rich countries such as the UK and USA have their top universities scoring highly within the global university community. Likewise, Hong Kong fits into the pattern with its high per capita income coinciding high scores for its top university.
There
is however one significant outlier to this relationship between national output
and university standards: China – this departure from the norm will be explored
later on in this article. On the opposite end of the extreme to China is United
Arab Emirates (red arrow), where, despite vast fortunes brought about by its
crude oil industry, has not been able to fully capitalize on the resources
available to raise the standards of its universities.
Conclusion
2: Rule of law, press freedom, & clean administrations deeply
affect rankings
Besides financial resources, most people
would intuitively regard freedom of thought as having a strong role to play in academic
performances of universities. We therefore look into the various aspects of
freedom of thought in this section.
The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI)
measures countries and territories based on how corrupt their public sector is
perceived by various expert surveys. Comparing CPI scores (higher means less
corrupt) with QS Ranking champion university scores reveal a pattern (Chart 2) similar to what ‘intuition’
suggested – more honest governments yield higher ranking universities. This
correlation also holds when we extend the comparison to include the top three
universities of each country (instead of just the number 1 entry), further
supporting the thesis that low corruption results in better university quality
(Chart 3).
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Chart 2: higher CPI scores (less
corruption) leads to higher scores for a country’s top university
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Chart 3:Same
correlation also hold when we extend the comparison
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A
sign of freedom of thought may be the ability to express those thoughts, and to
measure this, we used the World Press Freedom Index (low score means high
degree of press freedom) as a proxy. As expected, there appears to be a
reasonable correlation between higher press freedom and higher university
scores (Chart 4).
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| Chart 4: academic quality seems to be related to press freedom |
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| Chart 5: more rule of law may promote better university quality |
Another
aspect of freedom of thought may be related to how a country plays by a clear
set of rules which are fair and understood by all, as well as how the results
of academic work is protected – here we compare the Rule of Law Index with QS Ranking, and the results are shown in Chart 5 above.
As suspected, higher rule of law scores seem to represent
countries with higher university scores.
The above three indicators have some degree of
commonality among them (Figure 1).
We merged them into a single index and compared with university scores in a
standalone exercise, the results are shown in Chart 6 below. Unsurprisingly,
press freedom, rule of law and honest government all seem to contribute to the
running of successful university education.
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Figure
1: the main elements of the three indicators
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Chart 6: Integrated index also
influence the quality of university education
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Conclusion 3: more science and engineering
disciplines help lift university rankings
At
the start of this text we noted the peculiar situation of China possessing high
ranking universities despite the country’s low per capita GDP. This may come
down to the total size of China’s economy – as long as the absolute quantum is
large, there will be enough resources to focus on a national champion, and
given China is the world’s second largest economy, achieving more than one national
champion in the university league tables should not be an unsurmountable
challenge. Besides, the high proportion of science and engineering students in
China also helps its cause.
How
could this be so? This may be because science and engineering subjects have far
more practical areas to undertake research, and where the results are much more
clearly defined, helping to score on the various university ranking metrics. In
addition, many scientific disciplines may benefit from national defence related
spending, and research findings here may be less affected even when the
environment may be more restrictive as far as rule of law, press freedom and
honest government criteria are concerned.
This
‘science factor’ also explains why there is a stronger presence of
science/engineering schools amongst the top university ranks. For example, in
Chinese speaking areas, NTU Singapore, Tsinghua, and HKUST all have over half
the student body studying for science subject. This help them excel in rankings
versus their more liberal arts centric compatriots such as HKU and Fudan (see Chart 7, blue shade).
The
‘science factor’ also works in USA, for example, MIT (with >60% students
studying sciences) is far ahead of Columbia (less than 10%) (Chart 7, red shade). Similarly in the
UK, Imperial (nearly 70% science students) also ranks higher than KCL (below
10%) (Chart 7, green shade).
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Chart 7: the higher the proportion of
science and engineering students, the better ranking?
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Conclusion 4: Financial centres
need only attract talent, not nurturing it
In
order for the ‘science factor’ to excel, however, the need for supporting infrastructure
can be immense (eg space for laboratories, workshops) not to mention attractive
environments (New York, London are no match for Boston and Cambridge), which
are in short supply in financial centres.
Even
so, this has not prevented New York and London to become global financial
centres despite not having the top ranked universities situated in their city
boundaries – the top two universities in USA are Harvard and MIT, and the top
two in the UK are Cambridge and Oxford (Chart
8).
The
lesson for Hong Kong, if it is to fulfil its aspiration to be a global
financial centre, is this: there is no need to set aside precious land,
manpower, or financial resources to manufacture its own ‘world class’
university. By becoming a master of one – creating the right conditions to
attract talent and consolidate its position as a top flight global financial
centre – Hong Kong can avoid the alternative fate that being a jack of all
trades entails: descending into an also-ran city.
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Chart 8 : national champions need
not be located in global financial centres
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Conclusion 5: Privately run universities excel, governments should stop
meddling
Another important phenomenon the QS Ranking tables throw
up is the fact that most of the top ranking international universities are
privately run, not bureaucracy managed. Starting with global number 1 ranked
university down, one can see that as one descends the rankings, the proportion
of government run universities increases (Chart
9). This phenomenon could be more pronounced if one excluded the fact that
private institutions lack the unlimited resources of the public purse –
highlighting the superior execution capabilities of the private sector.
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Chart 9 : as one goes down the
rankings table, proportion of private universities also falls
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Furthermore, this phenomenon has its parallel in
the primary and secondary schools universes, where the most reputable entities also
tend to be privately run. This proves the basic economic principle that no
amount of bureaucratic good will is match for the proactive abilities of the
private sector.
The crucial lesson
to be learned by Hong Kong includes: privatise all universities, enlarge and
facilitate the importation of talent schemes to encourage the best people to
enter Hong Kong, as easily as Brits heading to London for the best paid jobs,
or Americans seeking their fortunes in New York. Only by declaring a global war
on attracting the best of the best can this city grow in an increasingly
competitive world.
One of the first
areas the HK government needs to dismantle barriers is that surrounding the
medical profession – not only will this raise service standards in the fast
falling public hospitals, reduce private sector medical bills, this move can
also increase the critical mass of talent required to make Hong Kong the de
facto regional (if not global) high value-add medical destination.
Final words
So what does this
research exercise tell students and parents? Perhaps none. This is because the
conclusion is already practised by all – they voted with their feet in
entrusting their future to private universities located in wealthy, free, and
low corruption countries. We merely visualised the behaviour in a series of
charts.
This article was
researched and written with significant input from Mr Simon Cheung, whose
contribution is greatly appreciated
