55 dropped, 6 stayed the same and 32 improved. Or to put it another way, this really isn't news. Then when you hear 96% of Chinese universities improved... this has nothing to do with the UK at all! <i>Of course</i> if one massive country manages to improve practically all their universities' rankings in 1 year, everyone else in the league table will be going down. The question is what happened? Did the universities actually just all suddenly improve in 1 year? I doubt it. This is almost certainly the rankings changing the way they regard Chinese universities.<p>When I was at Uni we had exactly this game happen. I was at a uni where our department was ranked highest in the country, then the student survey went around. At the time if you talked to anyone about how satisfied they were with the course they were pretty pissed off, somehow the department had managed to mis-grade every single group project for the largest single grade of the year and as a result capped everyone's grade, which for some people was very important.<p>Guess what we wrote in the student survey? That we fucking loved the place. Why? Because student satisfaction counted towards the rankings and we wanted our degrees to be valuable so we wanted a good ranking. All these measures are pretty bollocks.
I recently spent about a month total in Cambridge and Oxford, just as a remote worker / tourist. Having previously visited Harvard, Yale, MIT, Princeton, etc. it was my impression that American universities have an order of magnitude more resources than UK ones. Even an average state school campus in the US appears larger and better funded.<p>Of course, Oxford and Cambridge have a centuries-old historical legacy (and are both absolutely worth visiting, although I much preferred Cambridge) but they seemed more dependent on that traditional reputation. So if the “brand” of the UK goes down, it will have a direct effect on the top universities in a way that I don’t think would happen in the US.
The headline makes it seem like a UK thing, but<p>> Institutions in Europe and the US also fell back, and the report’s authors said the UK’s rankings had held up better than French, German, Japanese and American universities.<p>it feels more like a West vs the Rest (or even a Rest vs China) thing.
In the top 50 of the referenced global rankings[1], there are 5 non-western universities. The highest one ranked at 13 (Japan), then 27 (Japan), then 31 (South Korea), and finally 44 and 49 (China).<p>[1] <a href="https://cwur.org/2023.php" rel="nofollow">https://cwur.org/2023.php</a>
Considering how much more funding US universities have, this is inevitable. Also, most people here don't fund endowments or really give back to their universities.
Interesting that it mentions China rising in the same breath.<p>I'm not sure if I should be surprised there isn't a facet of the rating like:<p>"percent chance you will be disappeared for holding up a blank sheet of paper" or<p>"how excited other countries children are to attend."<p>Maybe the ranking just cares about how much money you are pouring into STEM research.