SmartPlanet: The world’s top universities — still no “smart nation”

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smartplanet logoWestern universities still dominate the upper reaches of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. But a power shift is underway and the east is beginning to rise through the ranks.

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings powered by Thomson Reuters judges research-led universities on teaching, research, citations (research influence), industry income and international outlook. Universities that do not teach undergraduates, only teach a single narrow subject or have produced research of fewer than 1,000 articles between 2007 and 2011 are not included in the rankings.

CalTech in California took the top spot for the third year in a row, followed by Harvard University, the UK’s University of Oxford, Stanford University and MIT. The same institutions make up the top 10 as last year, albeit with some changes in the pecking order and there is minimal movement among the world’s top 30, according to Times Higher Education, or THE.

However, Europe’s national flagships are losing ground to institutions in the east. The premier-ranked institutions in Germany, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Russia, Belgium, Ireland and Austria all fell. Meanwhile, the top players in China, South Korea, Japan and Singapore rose up the top 200 list.

Asia also has six top 50 institutions, up from five last year, THE says.

THE editor Phil Baty says the shift is due to governments in Europe reducing or freezing investment in higher education as a result of the economic crisis. Meanwhile, governments in Asia are beginning to put money behind their universities to make them more competitive.

And with increasing globalization, competition for the foreign student-dollar matters. By 2020, there will be 7 million internationally mobile students, according to UNESCO.

For a complete list or to search by region or subject go to the Times Higher Education Rankings page.

Phi Beta Iota:  A “smart nation” is one that fully integrates education, intelligence (decision-support) and research while harnessing the distributed intelligence of all eight tribes (academia, civil society including labor and religion, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non-profit.  By definition, a smart nation can only be achieved using open source everything (affordable, inter-operable, scalable) to engage in multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain information-sharing and sense-making so as to achieve ethical evidence-based education, intelligence, and research across all topics all the time, serving each individual citizen as they see fit.

See Also:

1995 GIQ 13/2 Creating a Smart Nation: Strategy, Policy, Intelligence, and Information

2008: Creating a Smart Nation (Full Text Online for Google Translate)

2008: World Brain as EarthGame (Full Text Online for Google Translate)

2009 Intelligence for the President–AND Everyone Else

2010 The Ultimate Hack Re-Inventing Intelligence to Re-Engineer Earth (Chapter for Counter-Terrorism Book Out of Denmark)

2013 Public Governance in the 21st Century: New Rules, Hybrid Forms, One Constant – The Public [Work in Progress]

Books By or With Robert Steele

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