THERE IS NO SPANISH UNIVERSITIES IN THE TOP 100 BEST IN THE WORLD

This is the tittle of the report published yesterday in the digital publishing of the newspaper El Mundo http://www.elmundo.es/sociedad/2016/09/06/57cdca0122601d2b2f8b4692.html Certainly this is a worrying headline because, in fact, none of them appears until the position 160 of the list, which is “la Universitat de Barcelona”.

But there is more bad news for the Spanish universities taken from the ranking created by the consultancy firm Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) http://www.qs.com published yesterday in El Mundo. According to this study, there are more Spanish centres going down than going up in the ranking.

United States of America is the country that heads the list, because it has five of their universities on the top ten, and three of them on the first three positions. The Anglo-Saxon education model commands this ranking, because the United Kingdom has another four universities among the best ten. In total, counting both countries, they have nine of ten.

In order to elaborate this ranking, the consultancy firm QS has considered some aspects like the academic reputation, the rating of teachers and researchers per student, the articles published by the colleges, the employability, and the rate of foreign students, teachers and researchers of each university. In general, in countries with public or private institutions contributing with a high level of investment in Higher Education, the universities rise in the ranking.

Why our doctors, nurses, engineers, lawyers… are so highly valued and demanded by companies and institutions in other countries and, however, the universities in which they obtained their degrees, are not among the best?

Spain is the country of the European Union that has more Erasmus students than any other country in Europe but, curiously, we don’t know how to retain them, because the Spanish universities have the worst rate of foreign students in the EU; the investment in education has fallen in recent years because of the crisis; we have one of the higher young unemployed rate in Europe; etc.… All of this contributes, without a doubt, to explain the bad results for our universities. The politics and academic authorities must analyse all these bad facts and take necessary actions to improve them.