Yale University's President Says Chinese Institutions Will Rank in World's Top 10 Universities in 25 Years. (February 4, 2010)

Richard Levin, president of Yale University was recently interviewed by The Guardian's Jessica Shepherd. In his view about the time a third of the 21^st century has past China would have universities which would be ranked in the World's top 10, though he didn't predict how many or by whose method of ranking.

Professor Levin, an economist, has been president of Yale since 1993. He points out that the Chinese government now spends at least 1.5% of its gross domestic product on higher education and it intends that its best institutions, such as the universities of Tsinghua and Peking should rise to join the likes of Harvard and Cambridge. He says: "China and India ... seek to expand the capacity of their systems of higher education ... and aspire simultaneously to create a limited number of world-class universities to take their places among the best. This is an audacious agenda, but China, in particular, has the will and resources that make it feasible. It has built the largest higher education sector in the world in merely a decade."

Quoting some statistics he notes that the number of its higher education institutions in the last decade has risen from 1,022 to 2,263, and over 5 million Chinese students now enrol in degree courses compared to 1 million in 1997. However, he also voiced concern that China's universities lack "multidisciplinary breadth" and "the cultivation of critical thinking", and then added: "I don't see the rise of Asia's universities as threatening. Competition in education is a positive sum game. Increasing the quality of education around the world translates into better informed and more productive citizens."

Professor Levin also offers some advice to China's political leaders: "To create world-class capacity in research, resources must not only be abundant, they must also be allocated on the basis of scholarly and scientific merit, rather than on the basis of seniority or political influence. To create world-class capacity in education, [China's] curriculum must be broadened and pedagogy transformed."

And then commenting on the funding cuts that are in store for British universities Professor Levin said it would be "a shame if the British government didn't recognise the status of Oxford and Cambridge as global leaders".