Yet Another Rankings of Universities ─ But With a Difference. (May 11, 2011)

Universitas 21, established in 1997 is a network of 23 research universities from 15 countries which has just released its "ranking of countries which are the ‘best’ at providing higher education", i.e. it has ranked the university sectors of 48 nations. As they describe their approach to the task:

[The] Research authors at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, University of Melbourne, looked at the most recent data from 48 countries and territories across 20 different measures. The measures are grouped under four headings: resources (investment by government and private sector), output (research and its impact, as well as the production of an educated workforce which meets labour market needs), connectivity (international networks and collaboration which protects a system against insularity) and environment (government policy and regulation, diversity and participation opportunities). It also takes population size into account and produces some interesting results.

Whether or not this is particularly useful for determining the contribution of the higher education sector to the commonweal of the nation supporting it, we leave you to judge, but we note here that the United States is the outright leader with a marked gap between it and Sweden ranked 2nd just above Canada, and the gap between the US and Sweden (1 to 2) is equal to the gap between Sweden and Israel (2-19) and Israel and Hungary (19-34).