This report presents the results for the seventh annual ranking of national systems of higher education undertaken under the auspices of the Universitas 21 (U21) network of universities.
Fifty national systems of higher education, from all continents, are evaluated across 24 attributes. The measures are standardised for population size. Countries are ranked overall and on each of four modules: Resources, Policy Environment, Connectivity and Output. Within each measure the highest achieving country is given a score of 100 and scores for other countries are expressed as a percentage of this highest score.
An overall ranking is obtained by summing the module scores out of 100 using weights of 40 per cent on Output and 20 per cent on each of the other three modules. The top five countries, in order, are the United States, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark. The only change from the 2017 rankings is that Denmark and Sweden have swapped positions. Finland and the Netherlands are equal sixth followed by Canada and Singapore with Australia rounding out the top ten. Finland has risen three places because of an improvement in relative performance for the Environment and Connectivity; Singapore has fallen three places owing to falls in the rank for Connectivity and Output. Systems evolve slowly over time.
Compared with the 2017 rankings, for 33 of our 50 countries the rank change was at most one. The largest change was a fall of five places for Hungary arising from reduced government funding. In addition to Singapore, four other countries fell by three places: the Czech Republic, Hong Kong SAR, Serbia and Ukraine. For two countries data changes were the cause of the fall: better information on the degree of autonomy of institutions in Serbia; change in the definition of joint international publications for Hong Kong SAR. In Ukraine, there was a decline in relative expenditure on higher education.