The World University Race
January 25th, 2010 
Academia 
Chris
Yglesias has an interesting piece about the race (particularly China’s) to compete with world class Western universities. I can attest to this: I did get the impression when I was teaching in China that Tsinghua (which is arguably one of the best in China), wants to quickly become not just the best in the nation, but a top university in the world. I’m not sure about the state of other Chinese universities, but I think that if becoming world competitive will require attracting international faculty and international students, the Chinese will need to make quite a few improvements to their universities before that happens (in a variety of areas; even at Tsinghua there’s still a sense of “roughing it” that will deter many potential teachers/students). The Yglesias piece is good and provides some decent links.
In one place Yglesias wonders how you would even measure whether a university is any good, and how much should be even taken from the fact that a university can attract world-famous talent. Money quote from Yglesias:
The fact that our very best universities are world-famous and attract talent and interest for all around the globe is nice, but it can lead people to just assume that everything’s fine throughout the sector when the reality is that we actually have no idea.
Surely a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one?
No Comments
Comments RSS
TrackBack Identifier URI
No comments yet. Be the first!
Leave a comment
