Asia threatens to knock British universities off the top table

India and China are set to overtake British, French and German universities within a decade unless they improve quality and access, the European Commissioner for Education has said.

London, May 21 : India and China are set to overtake British, French and German universities within a decade unless they improve quality and access, the European Commissioner for Education has said.

Jan Figel was quoted by The Times as saying that top European universities need to modernise and receive more funding if they want to retain their top global billing.

At present, Britain is the second most popular destination for overseas students, second to America, with Cambridge and Oxford the only European universities in the Top Ten of both the Times Higher and the Shanghai Jiao Tong indices of university world rankings. Europe has 200 universities in the top 500, but the United States has 37 in the top 50.

"If we don't act, we will see an uptake or an overtake by Chinese or Indian universities. Indian technology is seen as the third best in the world. China itself decided it wants several top universities by 2015," Figel said

Although China and India have a tiny number of universities in the Times Higher top 100, including Beijing, Tsinghua and the Indian Institutes of Technology, and none in the Shanghai top 100 index, Figel believes that Europe's supremacy in tertiary education is in imminent danger of being lost to Southeast Asia as well as the US, particularly in science.

Drummond Bone, the president of Universities UK, the umbrella group of vice-chancellors, believes that European universities must work together to create the critical mass to attract students and investment.

According to Martin read, CEO of LogicaCMG, a British company specialising in high-tech software systems, Britain cannot compete on numbers with China and India.

"If we're not getting sufficient numbers of high-quality graduates, we have a problem, because we don't have a framework for business to work in," he said. "Businesses will start to relocate if they can't find them in their own country," he said.

Figel says the answer lies in attracting more EU students with better quality degrees, to invest more in universities and to make EU degrees more easily transferred between countries, as proposed under the Bologna Process on schedule for 2010.

Europe spends about 1.1 per cent of GDP on higher education compared with the United States, which spends 2.7 per cent of GDP. China and India spend about 0.5 per cent and 0.37 per cent of GDP, respectively. But China is aiming to raise its investment to four per cent GDP in the coming years.

ANI