Does a Country/Region’s Economic Status Affect Its Universities’ Presence in International Rankings?
Article Category: Research Paper
Published Online: Jun 07, 2019
Page range: 56 - 78
Received: Feb 05, 2019
Accepted: Mar 25, 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jdis-2019-0009
Keywords
© 2019 Esteban Fernández Tuesta, Carlos Garcia-Zorita, Rosario Romera Ayllon, Elías Sanz-Casado, publsihed by Sceindo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.
Purpose
Study how economic parameters affect positions in the Academic Ranking of World Universities’ top 500 published by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Graduate School of Education in countries/regions with listed higher education institutions.
Design/methodology/approach
The methodology used capitalises on the multi-variate characteristics of the data analysed. The multi-colinearity problem posed is solved by running principal components prior to regression analysis, using both classical (OLS) and robust (Huber and Tukey) methods.
Findings
Our results revealed that countries/regions with long ranking traditions are highly competitive. Findings also showed that some countries/regions such as Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, and Italy, had a larger number of universities in the top positions than predicted by the regression model. In contrast, for Japan, a country where social and economic performance is high, the number of ARWU universities projected by the model was much larger than the actual figure. In much the same vein, countries/regions that invest heavily in education, such as Japan and Denmark, had lower than expected results.
Research limitations
Using data from only one ranking is a limitation of this study, but the methodology used could be useful to other global rankings.
Practical implications
The results provide good insights for policy makers. They indicate the existence of a relationship between research output and the number of universities per million inhabitants. Countries/regions, which have historically prioritised higher education, exhibited highest values for indicators that compose the rankings methodology; furthermore, minimum increase in welfare indicators could exhibited significant rises in the presence of their universities on the rankings.
Originality/value
This study is well defined and the result answers important questions about characteristics of countries/regions and their higher education system.