Evaluating the influence of country characteristics on the Higher Education System Rankings’ progress

Highlights：

• This paper examines the underlying factors, economic and non-economic, that make the countries to enhance the excellence of their university systems. Our study focuses on the 39 countries with universities in the Top 300 of the QS ranking 2018. A new indexed score is awarded for each university featured in the rankings (3 points for a university in the top 100, 2 points for 101-200 and 1 point for 201-300), finally divided by the population size of the country. This Excellence/Quality ranking lets users to appreciate the particular effort made by small countries, as happens with Top countries with population size by less than 10 million like New Zealand, Ireland, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Sweden, Finland, Norway or Denmark. An additional advantage of our approach is that the Excellence/Quality indicator can be constructed without collect new country single indicators. Moreover, our Excellence/Quality indicator may be computed for different WUR.

• A clustering analysis on the country’s economic potential in terms of the Excellence/Quality indicator, GDPpc, R&D expenditure (as a percentage of GDP) and Connectivity and Environment indices shows, basically, that we have two subgroups of countries, one with high GDPpc and another with low GDPpc. Moreover, the dispersion of all indicators considered is especially evident in the countries with high GDPpc.

• We have estimated multivariate regression models to predict the Excellence/Quality indicator using the country’s economic potential and two indices of Connectivity and Environment. GDPpc is the most relevant characteristic for Excellence/Quality followed by the Environment index. This effect is especially relevant for countries with low GDPpc.

• Our highlights suggest that although the most important factor that explains the university system excellence is the economic potential in terms of GDP per capita, the R&D expenditure, the policy and regulatory Environment and the Connectivity of the university system are also key factors for ensuring the excellence of the Higher Education systems. We conclude that they cannot be considered isolated from each other. The interaction between them determines the results of universities policy and the way to become a solid group of best-ranked university system.