Times Higher Education magazine published yesterday its 2011-2012 World University Rankings. The annual rankings, which are the most sophisticated and carefully calibrated rankings ever published, provide a definitive list of the world’s top 400 universities.

In the following we attempt a short analysis of the data in order to highlight the situation of the tertiary education in Greece.

1. Top ranking countries in number of universities in the list

This graph shows the number of universities from each country in the world's top 400 list. Clearly the US is the big winner, with 113 universities in the list. University of Crete is the sole entrant from Greece, at the 276-300 position.

2. Top ranking countries in aggregate score

In this graph we present the aggregate score for each country in the list (i.e. the sum of scores for all universities for the respected country).

However, in order to compensate for the size of each country, we normalize the above result with respect to the population, in millions.

3. Number of Universities per million people

The above graph depicts a normalized performance for each country, as the number of Universities in the world's top 400 list per a million people.

It is interesting that Iceland takes over the first place, being a very small country (320k people), with the US dropping down to the 20th position.

Again, the performance of Greece is very disappointing.

4. Country Score per million people

In this graph we normalize the total score for each country, with respect to its population. The results are very similar to the previous graph (#3). Greece still struggles in the last positions.

5. Country Score per billion US$ of GDP

However, in order to compensate for the population AND the living standards of each country, we finally normalize the aggregate country score with respect to the Gross Domestic Product in US dollars. By doing so, we get an idea of how well the same size of population, with the same living standards perform in the tertiary education.

We can see nations like Iceland, China, New Zealand, Estonia, Hong Kong and the UK filling the top 6 positions. At the same time, the 21st position of the US comes as a bit of a surprise, showing that the superb performance of the american universities is really due to the sheer size of the country and its economy.

Again, Greece performs very poorly, even in this double-normalized comparison.

Conclusions

All the data above show the dramatic position of the Greek tertiary education in the world arena. Even if we take into account the small size of the Country and normalize for the size of its economy, the results are as disheartening as before.