Europe Sees Asian Universities as Rapidly Approaching Stiff Competition. (May 21, 2007)

    The Times' Alexandra Blair reports on the European Commissioner for Education, Jan Figel's assessment that "British, French and German universities will be overtaken by those in China and India within a decade unless they improve quality and access.

Mr Figel told Ms Blair, "If you look at the Shanghai index, we are the strongest continent in terms of numbers and potential but we are also shifting into a secondary position in terms of quality and attractiveness. "If we don’t act we will see an uptake or overtake by Chinese or Indian universities. Indian technology is seen as the third best in the world. China itself decided it wants several top universities by 2015."

Drummond Bone, the president of Universities UK, the umbrella group of vice-chancellors agrees and believes, "Overseas students don’t come to the UK or Europe, our students are attracted elsewhere and then if you’ve got the students going elsewhere the businesses go elsewhere," and Martin Read, chief executive of LogicaCMG, a British company specialising in high-tech software systems says that while British universities maintain high standards and teach students to think for themselves, there is a lack of home-grown science, technology and maths graduates.

He told The Times, "If we’re not getting sufficient numbers of high-quality graduates, we have a problem, because we don’t have a framework for business to work in,” he said. “Businesses will start to relocate if they can’t find them in their own country."

And Ms Blair concludes, "Europe spends about 1.1 per cent of GDP on higher education compared with the United States, which spends 2.7 per cent of GDP. China and India spend about 0.5 per cent and 0.37 per cent of GDP, respectively. But China is aiming to raise its investment to 4 per cent GDP in the coming years."