subject: British Universities Loosing Their Sheen [print this page] Britain not long ago was considered the Mecca of higher learning and education, Oxford and Cambridge were synonymous with excellence in higher education. The UK has been over the years loosing its turf to the US in the areas of higher education and became a more preferred centre for higher education among students worldwide.
While the UK still holds on to its position as the second best in University rankings, figures reveal a clear fall from its position of pre-eminence. UK has only 29 of its Universities in the world's top 200 Universities while the USA has 72, US Universities have made a clean sweep of the world's 5 best Universities with Harvard, California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford and Princeton in that order. Experts opine that in the past tradition and heritage were key yardsticks in measuring the worth of a university a fact which helped British Universities greatly, but in today's ranking process the criteria has shifted to more practical and tangible factors like teaching standards, academic's qualifications, research income, number of citations per research paper, staff student ratio and number of overseas students on the rolls.
Countries like China and South Korea not traditionally in the race for providers of higher education have improved their University ratings remarkably thanks to a huge investment on Universities and higher education by their governments. The present coalition government's plans to further slash expenditure on higher education by a third as part of its sweeping cuts on public spending threatens to push UK's already shaky position still down the ladder.
David Willet the Minister of Universities has summed it rightly when he said that these ratings are a wake up call to the government just before big decisions (decision to cut government spending on universities by one third) are taken on University funding next month.
