Universities are not simply a mechanism for churning out a handful of elites and perpetuating social inequality but should be capable of empowering and equipping the largest possible number of individuals with the fullest set of tools she or he will need to become well-rounded participants in our social democracy and fully-functioning economic units in that society, says the report.
They must also stand out – as many systems do today – as centres of world-leading, independent research, capable of preserving, developing and perhaps even expanding our valuable cultural and scientific legacy for generations to come.
Research excellence not an excuse for poor teaching
But seeking excellence in research should never be allowed to become an excuse for underperformance in education. Indeed, in the end both objectives require each other to be successful, say the authors.
As the world moves towards a society where human capital is the largest and most basic determinant of a country’s economic success, the strongest systems are those which not only do the best job of educating the broadest number of their own citizens for the economic and social challenges we will face, but that themselves become magnets for the world’s talent.
To perform its broadest, and possibly most important, function in the modern knowledge-based economy, universities should not only provide opportunity to the local country or community that sustains it, they must also attract the best and the brightest from around the globe
Ranking of OECD countries university systems
To examine how universities deliver on these important economic and social goals, the authors examined and ranked 17 OECD countries – Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and US – on six separate criteria:
Inclusiveness: The ability of a country’s tertiary education system to graduate large numbers of students relative to the size of its population.
Access: The ability of a country’s tertiary system to accept and help advance students with low levels of scholastic aptitude from secondary schools. To measure this, the authors compared countries based on the skill threshold of students entering universities derived from recent OECD data.
Effectiveness: The ability of a country’s educational system to produce graduates with skills relevant for the country’s labour market. Here, the authors compared the average wage premiums a university graduate can expect.
Attractiveness: The ability of a country’s system to attract a diverse range of foreign students. To measure this, the authors looked at the percentage of foreign students coming to each country from their 10 top source countries, hoping to show whether a tertiary system merely attracts foreign students from neighbouring countries or whether the country has a wider appeal among the international student community.
Age-4ange: The ability of a country’s tertiary system to function as a lifelong learning institution.
Responsiveness: The system’s ability to reform and change. This measured the speed and effectiveness with which countries have adapted their education system to the criteria laid down in the Bologna Declaration, signed in 1999, which seeks to harmonise and improve cross-border recognition of degree courses and qualifications among its 29 signatories.
The results were then compiled into an overall University Systems Ranking, based on the average performance of each individual country in each of the six categories.
The authors claim the ranking is unique: it is designed not to look at how individual universities are doing at churning out top-level graduates, but to make a global comparison of how entire national systems of tertiary education are coping with the economic and social challenges of a 21st century knowledge-based society.
Of the 17 countries surveyed, Australia, United Kingdom and Denmark have the best tertiary education systems, ranking 1, 2 and 3, respectively. Taken together, their universities accept among the largest number of the local population for study, giving them high scores on Inclusiveness and Access. But their universities are also attractive to foreign students, which gives these countries an important leg up in the global war for talent.
And all three countries are frontrunners in the effort to offer continuing education to adults after they have left the formal education system. Finally, all three have opened up their education systems to a wide range of people without lowering their educational standards. On the contrary, there is much evidence that the diversity and inclusiveness of their educational system has helped them raise standards in important ways.
By contrast, Germany, Austria and Spain all fare badly, weighing in at 15, 16 and 17, respectively. Austria and Germany turn away the most students from higher education, and as a result offer it to a relatively low number of people.
Germany also suffers from low wage premiums for university graduates – a sign that the education system may not be turning out enough graduates with the right skills for the local labour market.
Germany is, however, an attractive place for foreign students, weighing in at No. 3 in this sub-indicator. This is offset by a poor performance on providing access to lifelong learning where Germany ranks 17.
Spain comes in last overall. While it ranks 12 on Inclusiveness, the measure of how many of its university-age students actually receive a university education, it ranks lower on most other categories, and particularly on Effectiveness – the wage premiums that a university education commands on the local labour market.
Other countries – such as Poland – do well in some categories. The country is good at accepting lots of students, including students of relatively low skill levels upon entering university, but it does very badly at matching skills to the local labour market and at attracting foreign students.
Portugal falls in the middle of the pack on overall score, but it comes out ahead of France and Germany on Inclusiveness and ahead of the US on Access. It also does well in the wage premium for a university degree category.
Even if this performance is the result of exogenous factors such as the country’s rapid economic growth since1985, the authors say it illustrates an important corollary to this study. A healthy labour market can itself be a catalyst for educational performance, and forms an integral part of the overall system encouraging citizens to pursue tertiary education and seek academic excellence.
Broadly speaking, Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian education systems dominate the top half of the ranking (Australia, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Sweden, United Kingdom and USA); while a broadly-defined Romano-Germanic block makes up most of the lower half (Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Switzerland).
Not just about Nobels
To date, most university rankings have looked only at the ability of systems to produce excellence. “Our essential argument is that a university system has a much broader mandate than producing hordes of Nobel laureates or cabals of tenure- and patent-bearing professors,” say the authors.
“Policy makers can and must learn that it is not enough to simply promote a handful of national champions in education, believing that individual pockets of excellence will somehow make up for overall mediocrity underneath.”
On the basis of their evidence the authors say the best-performing tertiary systems are geared primarily towards education. Conducting world-class research is an important aspect which allows some universities to turn out first-class students, but for the system as a whole, the educational mission is paramount.
University systems that focus exclusively on developing world-class research should not ignore their larger pedagogical mission, if they want to perform their full social and economic role in a modern, knowledge-based society.
University systems should be open and competitive, offering the widest chance to the broadest number of students.
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