The Analysis is Based on a Ranking of the World’s Top-500 Universities

An assessment carried out by AllAboutUni.com found that despite having two universities in the World’s Top-25, the overall performance of Japanese universities is weak. AllAboutUni.com is an independent, global and interactive website where visitors can obtain information about universities (global rankings, student reviews, university news and campus pictures).

The analysis is based on a ranking of the World’s Top-500 Universities produced by the Institute of Higher Education at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Several indicators of academic or research performance are used to establish the ranking, these include staff winning Nobel Prizes, highly cited researchers and articles indexed in major citation indices.

The World’s Top-500 universities (2008) are mainly located in Europe (n=210; 40%), the Americas (n=190; 40%) and the Asian/Pacific region (n=100; 20%). There are 31 (6%) Japanese universities, contributing roughly one in three (31%) of the Asian/Pacific region universities.

There are four Japanese universities in the World’s Top-100 universities and two of these are ranked in the World’s Top-25 universities: Tokyo University (ranked 19th) and Osaka University (ranked 23rd). The distribution of the other Japanese universities is as follows: five ranked 101-200, two ranked 201-302, six ranked 303-401 and 13 ranked 402-503.

In order to make a comparison with other industrialized countries, AllAboutUni calculates the number of universities in the World’s Top-500 per million inhabitants. An earlier assessment found that small countries in Western Europe (Sweden (1.2), Finland (1.1) and Switzerland (1.0)) do very well. Other large industrialized countries have the following number of universities per million inhabitants: Australia (0.7), United Kingdom (0.7), Canada (0.6), Germany (0.5), United States (0.5), France (0.4) and Italy (0.4). Japan (and Spain) only has 0.2 universities in the World’s Top-500 universities per million inhabitants.

These findings indicate that Japan has one of the lowest densities of the World’s Top-500 universities amongst industrialized countries. They also indicate that Japan has a density that is six times lower than Sweden and more than three times lower than Australia or the United Kingdom.

In conclusion, despite having two universities in the Word’s Top-25 universities (Tokyo University and Kyoto University), the overall performance of Japanese universities is poor compared to other industrialized countries around the world.