Beijing’s Renmin University has developed a new global educational quality index showing that Chinese institutions account for 14 percent of the top 100 universities worldwide, China Daily reports. The nation’s share rises to 15 percent of the top 300, then to 17 percent of the top 500 – indicating a greater concentration of Chinese universities as the ranking scope expands beyond the top tier.
US universities accounted for the largest share of the top 100, at 35 percent. While they held strong leads in both humanities and STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), Renmin researchers noted that the Chinese universities performed particularly well in areas including materials science, electronic engineering, chemistry, computer science and economics.
They said that global disciplinary discourse patterns and the prevailing English-language academic publication system contributed to the US’ dominance in its ranking, as Chinese scholars are operating in fields where standards, gatekeepers and prestige are largely defined elsewhere.
[See more: China ranks a close second in a new global STEM education index]
Renmin’s index is framed as a list of the world’s top 500 recommended study destinations, rather than a conventional 1-to-500 ordinal ranking. Zhou Guangli, executive director of the university’s Evaluation Research Center, said the decision not to publish it as a full numerical ranking was intended to reduce overemphasis on relative positions and to underline that all institutions included were credible options for international students.
The researchers graded each university from A+ to C according to percentile rankings, with evaluation criteria weighted toward academic innovation (50 percent), talent cultivation (30 percent) and international reputation (20 percent). Aside from the US and China, the best represented countries were the UK, Australia, Germany, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan and Spain. The individual universities that made the index were not reported by the Daily.
The article quoted Chen Zhiwen, editor-in-chief of China’s online education portal EOL.cn, saying that the number of Chinese students opting to study in Western countries had dropped during the past five years. According to him, destinations like Thailand, Malaysia and other Belt and Road countries were gaining in popularity for strategic reasons – such as closer alignment with family business interests and industrial relocation trends.
