Martin Ince, Member of the QS Advisory Board
The BRICS countries are a classic case of what biologist Richard Dawkins calls a “meme”, an idea that injects itself into culture and conversation and affects people’s thinking, much as a gene affects their biology.
Since the British economist Jim O’Neill thought up the BRICS term in 2001, it has become standard shorthand for the idea that the world’s economic future is not in the hands of traditional players such as the US, Europe and Japan. More recently, a range of other groupings have also been proposed to convey the same concept, including the MINTs (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey), the CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa) and the EAGLES (the Emerging and Growth-Leading Economies, a larger and more changeable group). But none has real traction compared to the original BRICS idea.
The five BRICS countries are scarcely a homogeneous grouping. China and India are the world’s most populous nations, while South Africa has fewer people than Britain. South Africa and India are former British colonies; China is still nominally communist.
But if these nations are to compete with the existing developed world, they will need world-class university systems, and this is what the QS University Rankings: BRICS project is all about.
Top BRICS universities performing at comparable level
The ranking has been compiled from some of the same indicators used in the QS World University Rankings®, including data from our global surveys of academic and employer opinion as well as information on faculty/student ratio, research citations, and international faculty and student numbers. In addition, we have used two measures intended to reflect specific BRICS priorities. These are percentage of staff with a PhD, and overall research productivity, irrespective of citations. (See the full methodology here.)
The first thing to note is that all five of the BRICS countries are represented in the upper reaches of this ranking. China has the top two places while Russia’s highest-placed institution is third. Brazil and South Africa’s top entrants are at 7 and 9, and India first appears at 13. This shows that these nations all have top-quality higher education systems, and validates the idea of ranking them alongside each other.
Influential research next challenge for China
It is noticeable that China has six of the top 10 places in the 2014 QS University Rankings: BRICS, one fewer than in 2013, but still a high score. As well as being well-esteemed by the world’s academic and employer experts, Chinese universities are highly productive of research papers. The top two BRICS universities, Tsinghua and Peking, score 97.4 and 89.6 respectively on this measure, while the third, Lomonosov Moscow State in Russia, scores just 37.5.
The key question for China is whether this massive output of research papers will turn in time into influential discoveries cited around the world. It seems from these results that China’s top universities are managing this feat, but it may be harder to replicate across the system as a whole.
China’s big Asian rival, India, has little reason to draw comfort from these rankings. It has only 20 universities and institutions among the 200 we list in this edition of the ranking, compared to 71 in China, 53 in Russia, 45 in Brazil and 11 in South Africa, the last of which has less than 5% of India’s population. The Indian university system is a strong on a national scale, but our data shows that it holds little attraction for globally mobile students and academics.
Growing global visibility, but still progress to be made
By contrast, it seems that the well-liked universities of Brazil are good at attracting international faculty, perhaps because of the country’s fast-growing research budgets, but poor at bringing in overseas students. The Brazilian government is keen to send many more students abroad. One effect of their presence on campuses around the world may be growing visibility for Brazil as a place to study.
Brazil’s results are also the polar opposite of those for Russia, whose universities bring in many foreign students, but far fewer foreign staff. It is also notable that the methodology of these rankings brings out the high quality of Russia’s specialist institutions in fields such as science, business and engineering, which overall world rankings often fail to capture.
South African universities are well-represented here despite the country’s small population. However, this table shows again that South African institutions are uniformly behind the game in terms of faculty/student ratio, having large classes and too few people to teach them. There is little sign of this long-running problem being solved.
Remember too that the top two universities we list here – Tsinghua and Peking – are currently in 48th and 47th place in our overall QS World University Rankings, while the 100th (Plekhanov Russian University, the last one listed in an individual position) is at 701+ in the world rankings. This means that the BRICS countries are still a long way from competing with the elite higher education systems of Europe, Australia, the US, Singapore or Hong Kong.