IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/qld/uq2004/391.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Why does the US dominate university league tables?

Author

Abstract

According to Academic Ranking of World Universities, the world�s top 500 universities are owned by only 38 countries, with the US alone having 157 of them. This paper investigates the socioeconomic determinants of the wide performance gap between countries and whether the US�s dominance in the league table is largely due to its economic power or something else. It is found that a large amount of cross country variation in university performance can be explained by just four socioeconomic factors: income, population size, R&D spending, and the national language. It is also found that conditional on the resources that it has, the US is actually underperforming by about 4 to 10 percent.

Suggested Citation

  • Mei Li & Sriram Shankar & Kam Ki Tang, 2009. "Why does the US dominate university league tables?," Discussion Papers Series 391, School of Economics, University of Queensland, Australia.
    • Handle: RePEc:qld:uq2004:391
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://economics.uq.edu.au/files/44602/391.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hălăngescu, Constantin I., 2012. "Mundus academicus: arhitectura și adaptarea la fluxurile globalizării (I) [Mundus academicus: architecture and adaptation to globalization flows (I)]," MPRA Paper 36839, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Frenken, Koen & Heimeriks, Gaston J. & Hoekman, Jarno, 2017. "What drives university research performance? An analysis using the CWTS Leiden Ranking data," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 11(3), pages 859-872.
    3. Zhimin Liu & Goodluck Jacob Moshi & Cynthia Mwonya Awuor, 2019. "Sustainability and Indicators of Newly Formed World-Class Universities (NFWCUs) between 2010 and 2018: Empirical Analysis from the Rankings of ARWU, QSWUR and THEWUR," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(10), pages 1-29, May.
    4. Vicente Safón, 2013. "What do global university rankings really measure? The search for the X factor and the X entity," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 97(2), pages 223-244, November.
    5. Tan Kuan Lu, Clifford, 2014. "University Rankings Game and its relation to GDP per capita and GDP growth," MPRA Paper 53933, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Vicente Safón & Domingo Docampo, 2020. "Analyzing the impact of reputational bias on global university rankings based on objective research performance data: the case of the Shanghai Ranking (ARWU)," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(3), pages 2199-2227, December.
    7. Olcay, Gokcen Arkali & Bulu, Melih, 2017. "Is measuring the knowledge creation of universities possible?: A review of university rankings," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 123(C), pages 153-160.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:qld:uq2004:391. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SOE IT (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/decuqau.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.