What do the universities of the New World better compared to those on the Old Continent?
It was almost a thousand years ago, when the University of Bologna, or Alma Mater Studiorum (Nourishing Mother of Studies), the oldest university functioning constantly started teaching various disciplines at graduate level. The University of Bologna kept on carrying the torch of science and education into further horizons while facing important political difficulties. Soon after its establishment, many other universities emerged in different corners of the Europe; Oxford, Cambridge, Salamanca, Padua, Prague, leading to a scientific revolution that the West has long been proud of.
Translating and teaching the seminal works written by prominent Islamic and Greek scholars, the West became the new intellectual centre of the world. Oddly enough, the discovery of the New World paved the way for new educational institutions in the North America that surpassed the European ones in terms of educational outcomes, research facilities and investments. Hence, the question arises as to why European universities, the oldest educational institutions home to numerous discoveries, lag behind the American ones. Some may simply attribute this to the political circumstances; however, answering this very serious question requires a broader perspective. Let us first look at the desirable outcomes that American universities achieved before presenting the possible reasons of why European universities lagged behind Americans in achieving these outcomes.
Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, Centre of the Smart
First of all, most of the American universities ranked in top 500 spend more money on research and have larger endowments. Moreover, American universities have more articles and books published, most of which are cited far more frequently than works published elsewhere. According to the Leiden University Ranking, only 11 non-American universities ranked among the top 50 in the “proportion of the publications of a university belonging to the top 10% of their field”, which is a clear indication of quality. Similarly, only 14 non-American universities ranked in the top 50 “average number of citations of the publications of a university”. Today, the annual sum of total research expenditure of the top 10 American universities exceeds 7 billion dollars and the endowments exceed 100 billion dollars, which are not comparable with any other country.
