Japanese and Finnish universities produce the most literate graduates
Today, higher education is dominated by a strict hierarchy. A clear example is international university rankings. When evaluating a university, many factors are taken into account: from reputation and student-to-faculty ratio to the number of research papers. Yet, until now, no ranking has compared the educational abilities of students.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in its annual report Education At A Glance, published the results of tests that assessed the abilities of graduates from various universities. The results were surprising: the top positions in the resulting list were held by universities quite different from those we are used to seeing in international ranking tables (where, as a rule, British and American universities – Harvard, Stanford, MIT, etc. – make the top). However, in terms of graduate literacy, it was not the UK and the US that came out ahead, but Japan and Finland. Here is the OECD's top ten:
• Japan
• Finland
• Netherlands
• Sweden
• Australia
• Norway
• Belgium
• New Zealand
• United Kingdom
• United States
None of the winning countries hold leading positions in traditional educational rankings. But despite the fact that the American Ivy League, which includes the leading universities in QS, THE, and other major rankings, is known worldwide, graduates of Australian and Norwegian universities seem to perform better academically. Meanwhile, the top 100 of the world's best universities list includes 32 American universities and only one New Zealand one – yet New Zealand graduates, according to the OECD test results, are capable of achieving greater success than their American counterparts.
The OECD study also touched on the question of how the quality of education correlates with the amount of investment. For example, Denmark, with its affordable tuition fees, outperforms the US and the UK, where the cost of education is much higher.
The test results also indicate why good performance in school may not always be linked to success in university. Singapore and South Korea – countries with developed school education – ended up in the second half of international university rankings. And universities in Italy, Spain, and Greece even close the higher education rankings.
Andreas Schleicher, Director of the OECD Directorate for Education, believes the data confirms that the skill levels of people with the same qualifications can actually vary greatly. They may all have degrees, but the difference lies in the quality of the higher education they received. "If we are talking about a high level of literacy, then it is probably better to get a secondary education in Japan, Finland, or the Netherlands than a higher education in Italy, Spain, or Greece," Schleicher explains.
"The OECD test results may differ from traditional university rankings, but these two studies cannot be compared with each other," says Ben Sowter, head of QS university rankings. "The OECD examined the standards of national education systems, while university rankings focus on the most successful representatives of individual universities."
Sowter also added that if every US university could be taken into account in the rankings, researchers would see that each has both advantages and disadvantages. The American education system is extremely heterogeneous, but rankings focused on the elite do not allow this to be understood.
The QS World University Rankings 2016-2017, meanwhile, looks like this:
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Stanford University
• Harvard University
• University of Cambridge
• California Institute of Technology
• University of Oxford
• University College London
• ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
• King's College London
• University of Chicago
"Finland owes the high quality of its graduates' education equally to its school system and its universities," Sowter explains. And it seems that getting into a bad university in Finland is harder than doing the same in the US.
According to Sowter, the OECD study raised a pressing question about budget allocation priorities: whether to maintain an equally high level of education across all universities, or to focus on a few leading institutions in the country. In his view, the test results provide sufficient economic justification for striving for consistently high educational standards, rather than just creating charts with peaks and troughs. The university ranking system can reveal differences between individual institutions, but it seems unable to assess the overall level of education in a country.
The OECD also created the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), in which schools from 70 countries participate every three years. Not long ago, experts proposed conducting similar tests among students to compare universities. Not all universities, especially in the US, welcomed this idea, but even if the methods of calculating results in such rankings are questionable, their importance cannot be denied. When Oxford first topped The Times Higher Education World University Rankings in 2016, the news was one of the top stories in all British media. But, according to OECD rankings, the victory should perhaps be celebrated not by British, but by Finnish and Japanese students.