By IRNA,
London : British universities have slipped in the annual ranking of the world’s leading universities with the country’s top institutions, including Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial, losing out to American rivals.
The latest global league table, compiled by the Times Higher Education magazine and QS World University Rankings, reveals that 22 of the 29 British universities in the top 200 in the world have moved down the table in the past year.
Harvard for the fifth consecutive year is ranked top, while Yale moves ahead of both Oxford and Cambridge, after all three shared joint second place last year. Imperial College in London also fell one place to sixth behind California Institute of Technology.
Responding to the table, British vice-chancellors still argued that UK universities still punch far above their weight, but expressed doubts about their ability to maintain competition with their American rivals due to underfunding.
“We are very concerned about our ability to sustain this level of success in the face of fierce global competition,” said Wendy Piatt, director general of the Russell Group of leading UK research universities.
“In terms of GDP, the US invests over twice as much as the UK on higher education, and their major research-intensive universities are amongst the largest beneficiaries,” Piatt said.
But Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and Colleges union, said that the ability of British institutions to deliver so much with less funding makes the “achievements of our universities and, in particular, their staff all the more impressive.”
With countries like China, India, Brazil, Australia and in the Middle East, Hunt warned that there was “a real danger that the UK’s success will not be sustained.”
Assessing value for money, Ann Mroz, editor of Times Higher Education, said that Harvard may be No 1 in the world, but it “costs 50% more to attend than the No 4-ranking University of Oxford.” The rankings are based on interviews with 6,354 academics and 2,339 universities and on other factors including the staff-to-student ratio found in each institution.