International Higher Education, Fall 2003
The Costs and Benefits of World-Class Universities
Philip G. AltbachPhilip G. Altbach is Monan professor of higher education and director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College.
Everyone wants a world-class university. No country feels it can do without one. The problem is that no one knows what a world-class university is, and no one has figured out how to get one. Everyone, however, refers to the concept. A Google search, for example, produces thousands of references, and many institutions call themselves "world class"--from relatively modest academic universities in central Canada to a new college in the Persian Gulf. This is an age of academic hype, with universities of different kinds and in diverse countries claiming the exalted status of world class--generally with little justification. Those seeking to certify "world classness" generally do not know what they are talking about. For example, Asiaweek, a respected Hong Kong–based magazine produced a ranking of Asian universities for several years until their efforts were so widely criticized that they stopped. This article tries the impossible--to define a world class university, and then to argue that it is just as important for academic institutions to be "national" or "regional class" rather than to seek to emulate the wealthiest and in many ways most elitist universities.
Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard for almost 40 years in the late 19th century, when asked by John D. Rockefeller what it would take to create the equivalent of a world-class university, responded that it would require $50 million and 200 years. He was wrong. At the beginning of the 20th century, the University of Chicago became a world-class institution in two decades and slightly more than $50 million--donated at the time by Rockefeller himself. The price has ballooned, not only because of inflation but because academic institutions have become immensely more complex and expensive. The competition has also become much fiercer. Now, it might take more than $500 million along with clever leadership and much good luck.
There are not many world class universities. Higher education is stratified and differentiated. We are concerned here only with the tiny pinnacle of institutions seeking to be at the top of national and international systems of higher education. In the United States, the number of top universities is small. The Association of American Universities, generally seen to be the club of the elite, has just over 50 member universities (many of which are not world-class), a number that has grown only modestly since it was established in the early 20th century--out of a total of more than 3,500 academic institutions. Even in the United States, very few universities have managed to claw their way up to the top echelons. In other countries, the number of top-tier institutions is also limited, even when, as in Germany, all universities are basically treated the same in terms of budgets and mission by the government. The most elite universities are located in a small number of countries--in the mid-1980s, the Asian Wall Street Journal listed among the top ten only four not in the United States (Cambridge and Oxford, Paris (Sorbonne), and Tokyo).
