The performance of universities in the Times Higher Education Emerging Economies University Rankings over the past few years has been dominated by the rise of China. But, as the line chart shows, China is not the only system that has been rapidly improving.

Malaysia, too, has seen its institutions¡¯ performance rise on a similar trajectory, with its mean overall score in the rankings pulling away from those systems that were closest to it two years previously: Russia and Taiwan.

Meanwhile, India and Egypt are two systems that have actually overtaken others since 2019, and they have also both gained ground from?Turkey, a country whose universities seem to have only marginally improved relative to others.

At the other end of the scale, Mexico seems to be losing ground to other systems in the Emerging rankings, with its average score barely rising in the past two years as others moved ahead.

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The other chart shown here gives an idea about the elements of these overall scores in which the Emerging systems perform particularly well, and where there is ground to make up on the rest of the world.

For instance, on industry income, the Emerging universities have a similar profile of scores to institutions in the World University Rankings (the box and whiskers chart shows the distribution of scores in each metric with the line being the median). Another area in which?institutions from developing systems are not far behind is research income.?However, it is worth bearing in mind the major impact of China on both these areas.

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Metric-level performance of universities in Emerging v World University Rankings 2021

Note: Emerging scores are the box and whiskers plots on the left; World University Ranking scores are the plots on the right

One metric in which Emerging institutions appear to be performing well even outside China is international research co-authorship.

Meanwhile, areas where Emerging universities are still lagging a fair way behind include research productivity and citation impact, where scores are well below the world distribution.

simon.baker@timeshighereducation.com

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