New assessments of Turkish and British universities and the internationalization factor

In recent days, a news-article was published in the British newspaper The Guardian to the effect that UK universities face an 'irreversible decline.' Richard Adams, the newspaper's education editor who wrote the piece, based it on the latest report of the international university assessment organization Quacquarelli Symonds (QS). Because 52 of 90 institutions fell compared with last year in this year's ranking in the report, Adams says some British higher education institutions are in danger of closing.

In the report, of the 90 universities in the ranking, a relative rise is seen in only 20, while a decline is recorded in 52 of the rest and stagnation in the others. For example, even Cambridge, Britain's historic and legendary university, which was ranked 2nd in last year's ranking, has fallen to 5th this year.

The QS ranking is an annual university measurement and rating list published by the Quacquarelli Symonds Company, a British organization specializing in education. QS, which worked in partnership between 2004 and 2009 with Times Higher Education, which today again publishes its own results separately, also has an intelligence unit responsible for compiling the rankings; it reaches its results by compiling data every year from thousands of academic respondents and is accepted as a quite reliable organization by independent academic circles.

In this year's assessments, 5663 higher education institutions from around the world were taken under evaluation, but 1503 of them were ranked. The evaluations are made taking into account 30 percent academic reputation, 15 percent employer reputation, 20 percent citations per academic, 10 percent student-to-faculty ratio, 15 percent internationalization, 5 percent sustainability and 5 percent employment outcomes.

According to these criteria, Turkey's universities have also been evaluated and, unlike Britain, a visible rise has been recorded. Accordingly, there are 25 universities from Turkey both last year and this year. But while last year 3 Turkish universities were in the top 500, this year 5 universities are. Moreover, of the 25 Turkish universities in the ranking, 15 have recorded a rise while the other 10 have kept their places in last year's ranking. Some of these 25 universities have begun entering the rankings in recent years, and it is seen that they raise their places in these rankings with each passing year.

As you will recall, similar data were included in the "World University Rankings 2023" report of the London-based international higher education rating organization Times Higher Education (THE), published around this same time last year and mentioned here. According to that report, 3 universities from Turkey entered the top 500, and a total of 11 universities entered the top 1000. More important than that, Turkey was now seen as one of the best-represented countries in the overall world ranking.

75 Turkish universities took part in that ranking (this figure had been 61 the previous year), and it was emphasized that the number of universities from Turkey entering the ranking had more than tripled compared with 2018. This makes Turkey the seventh best-represented country in the ranking, after giants such as the US, India and China. In these rankings, in which assessments are made according to different criteria, it is very clear that Turkey is covering a very great distance.

With this year's data, the QS report shows that the rising trend achieved at Turkish universities compared with last year continues steadily. Many universities today can reap in a few years the seeds they have sown, so we may record much faster developments in the coming years too. Of course this does not prevent us from seeing and voicing some problems experienced in our universities today.

However, a point that The Guardian's education editor Richard Adams has long insisted on draws attention regarding how the news of the decline of British universities is assessed in British public opinion. In his article Adams says that the government's making it harder to grant visas to students because of recent immigration policies has a large share in this decline at British universities.

In Adams's article, Imperial College London's president Prof. Hugh Brady is reported to have stated that Britain's success may be put at risk by government policies in the UK that restrict international student visas in particular and undermine the graduate work visas necessary to bring talented students and researchers to university. Brady, elaborating somewhat further on the contributions of international students to the national economy, added: "There are many benefits to having international students. But the truth is that without this income we could not cross-subsidize the education of UK students and indeed many courses."

Quoting similar statements by QS's senior vice president Ben Sowter, Adams had in fact kept drawing attention to this subject even before this report was published. For example, on 13 May in the same column he warned that British universities faced a great decline because of visa difficulties and that "further restrictions on student visas would disrupt the flow of talent that is vital to Britain's creative industries."

As far as can be seen, Britain is very well aware that a significant part of the historical quality at its own universities depends on the flow of international students and creative talent. That is why it records the halting of the flow because of visa policies as one of the most important reasons for the decline experienced at universities. Of course, foreign students provide not only a flow of talent but also a flow of finance.

Turkish universities, on the other hand, have only just discovered the way of attracting international students and of securing both a flow of talent and a flow of finance through this. Although great distance has been covered very quickly in this area, there are entirely different problems we face right at the start: practices that count every student as an illegal immigrant and apply unfathomable pressure in the name of combating this. We have touched on these before, let us not go into them again, but Talip Küçükcan's recently published report on the contributions of this matter to university quality, financing and horizons, as well as to long-term cultural, scientific, public and political diplomacy, presents all the data necessary for developing policy.

This field must not be left to the empty noise and crowds produced by marauders of unknown provenance.