Which university systems deliver the most ‘bang for buck’?

It is the holy grail of governments and university leaders alike – and, in fact, anyone in charge of a budget: getting the most value for your money.

Now new analysis from Times Higher Education, using World University Rankings 2024 data, can reveal which countries get the most “bang for their buck” from their university systems.

THE’s data scientists have given each institution in the rankings a score by using three income metrics – institutional income, research income and industry income – and comparing them with the scores for research, teaching and working with industry. By then zooming out to country level averages, we can gain a broad view of which countries’ university systems are eking the most out of their revenue.

Top 20 institutions

Source: THE. Analysis by Billy Wong

The top 10 countries, looking only at those with 10 or more universities ranked, are the UK, France, Iran, Pakistan, Italy, India, Spain, the US, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

In the UK, Brighton and Sussex Medical School – a partnership between the universities of Brighton and Sussex – is the highest-scoring institution. It is followed by the London School of Economics, the University of Edinburgh, Lancaster University, Birkbeck, University of London and UCL.

Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi), credited the UK’s strong performance to a combination of committed staff, aspirational students, a recognised place in civic society that ensures universities are widely valued and institutional autonomy. “I am sure most countries will claim to have these things, but assessments of the level of autonomy by the European University Association tend to find the UK does exceptionally well,” he said.

“The fact that a relatively high proportion of our research takes place in universities also means they are seen as being crucial to technological breakthroughs to a greater degree than in, say, Germany,” Mr Hillman said.

Historic advantages such as strong learned societies and generous third-party funders that work closely with universities, as well as policymakers who want to see clear economic returns before investing large sums of public money, also contributed, according to Mr Hillman. “Of course, all these issues need to be constantly defended against attack,” he noted.

Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at the University of Oxford, said the UK was very good at extracting high performance from moderate levels of expenditure, especially in research. “Systems and governance and management have been honed over the years to maximise efficiency in relation to targets and goals. Local autonomy is real but plays out within tightly controlled systems,” he said.

France is another strong player when it comes to efficiency in higher education. Its highest-scoring institutions are Sorbonne University and Université Paris Cité. Aix-Marseille University, Montpellier University and Université Grenoble Alpes also score well.

A spokesperson for France Universités, which represents executive directors of universities, said French institutions “have undergone radical restructuring over the past 10 years, with major mergers of different structures to create large institutions, and the adoption of experimental statutes to make them more agile, while remaining democratic organisations in keeping with their history. Autonomy has also enabled them to make more strategic choices and, for some universities, to specialise in their strong points.”

Johannes Angermuller, professor of discourse, languages and applied linguistics at the Open University, said it was “quite clear” why France had been so efficient in providing good-quality higher education for so little money. “The focus of the French system is on academic human capital, so most of the resources go to students, teachers and researchers, with comparatively little investment in public relations, buildings, laboratories or extracurricular activities,” he said.

University was virtually free to most students, but investment had been focused, said Professor Angermuller. “Like in other countries, administration has grown, too, but my hunch is it has been slightly less than elsewhere and academics with full-time teaching loads do more administration. Also, there is little discretionary money that managers and academics can spend on projects that are not related to students,” he said.

France’s remuneration system for academics had a role to play, said Professor Angermuller, who has researched academic salaries in France, the US, Germany and the UK. “Almost all university teachers are permanent public servants, and they are all paid standard rates. There is no room for negotiating salaries, even for the most senior ones, who are paid like everybody else, following the same national salary grid,” he said.

European nations are not the only ones performing well relative to income. Pakistan is another country exceeding expectations. Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, COMSATS University Islamabad and Government College University Faisalabad all scored well on value for money.

Professor Marginson said Pakistan had “long been an anomaly”, with a very low gross domestic product per capita and yet substantial scientific output.

“I think this is because the country is so very highly segmented in terms of class and zones of economic development,” with a mixture of extremely poor regions and cities with wealthy urban elites hosting research universities “along anglophone lines, in continuity with the colonial period”, he said.

Ali Cheema, vice-chancellor at Lahore University of Management Sciences, said the resurgence of higher education in Pakistan could be traced to the late 1980s. “The transformation has been led by some non-profit private and public sector universities with strong undergraduate and professional programmes,” he said.

“These institutions initially focused on teaching excellence and were able to place their undergraduates in highly rated PhD programmes globally. Many of these students chose to return to Pakistan as academics after their PhDs and the return of accomplished scholars and teachers has been the critical ingredient that has enabled these institutions to sustain programmes of excellence.

“The availability of a greater pool of accomplished young academics has allowed these centres of excellence to pivot their focus towards research with greater impact in terms of research publications.”

Another developing country to score well is Iran, with Babol Noshirvani University of Technology and the University of Tehran performing especially well. This could largely be put down to the expansion of higher education after the 1979 revolution, said Mehrzad Boroujerdi, vice-provost and dean of the College of Arts, Sciences and Education at Missouri University of Science and Technology.

“The Iranian education system has traditionally prioritised STEM disciplines, and the high-school curriculum is renowned for its robustness. Entrance into top-tier universities typically involves rigorous examinations, resulting in academically strong students,” said Professor Boroujerdi, who was previously president of the Association for Iranian Studies. “The government’s strategic emphasis on specific research domains such as nanotechnology and computer science has yielded promising results, with evident returns on investment in these areas.”

While saving cash is all well and good, some researchers were keen to point out that there is often a cost to pay elsewhere.

Julien Gossa, an analyst of higher education policy and associate professor in computer science at the University of Strasbourg, said France’s high score was skewed by a publication rate that might not reflect quality research. Academics were incentivised to over-publish, “which has recently become almost inevitable in order to get a tenured position or a promotion”.

The main point to note, Dr Gossa said, was that the French system relied heavily on the goodwill of underpaid academics. “Our sense of duty to society as a whole drives us to work even without individual gain.” Salaries were frozen 15 years ago and then increased below inflation, he pointed out, which meant “until recently, the official starting salary of a tenured academic was only 1.4 times the minimum wage”.

For Dr Gossa, “the secret of France’s ‘bang for their buck’ is to pressurise researchers while lowering their salaries, by using their sense of duty to society to avoid ‘quiet quitting’”.

rosa.ellis@timeshighereducation.com