Archives for posts with tag: University Ranking

(note: I haven’t written a blog in weeks because I’ve moved recently and have been working a great deal since then.)

One thing that is too often absent in the debate about immigration in developed countries has been the so-called “Brain Drain.” This term is used to describe the trend of mass emigration of skilled/highly educated workers (also called “human capital”) to a few high interest places. This trend has been documented both between countries and inside of countries. In the US, this has been described as “rural flight” while the international phenomenon continues to be called either “human capital flight” or simply the “brain drain.” Most developing countries see some form human capital flight, be it Ethiopia’s loss of doctors to Chicago or the high percentage of Chinese who study abroad and choose to stay abroad after graduating. While these countries lose human capital, many developed countries gain human capital as a result of this.

America and other developed countries benefit immensely from large amounts of highly educated individuals migrating to their shores:


The trend isn’t new, either. From the Chinese source we can see that even in the 1970s Chinese students were moving to the US with only a minority choosing to return. Similarly, the trend of educated individuals fleeing the countryside in America isn’t new; this map shows US migration from 1970 to 2000:

Something that’s always interested me when it comes to maps/graphs about the brain drain is they often break down either by country (which country is gaining and which is losing) or they only focus on recent statistics (who is moving where right now). Instead I would like to look at which parts of the US have the highest concentration of educated/skilled individuals. This is not intended to rank how intelligent parts of America are, or to malign the parts of the US where educational attainment is low. Instead I want to look at where the highest concentration of people with at least post-secondary education reside in the US. I decided to use the American Human Development Project in part because it allows you to measure these indicators by state but also by Congressional District (CDs). I think this is the best metric because US congressional districts have to be at least similar in population, only small states like South Dakota have wildly divergent congressional district populations. Of course there are other problems that can threaten congressional districts as units of measure: they can be gerrymandered to include disproportionate percentages of groups for political reasons. But while this could threaten the reliability of statistics on educational attainment, I don’t think it threatens the reliability of broader observations about educational attainment in the US.

Alright, now for my map and my methodology: I used a ranking of the top congressional districts in the US by percent of population with at least a Bachelor’s Degree. I made the threshold 32%, which produced 121 congressional districts. (You can find a table of this data here)

Many things can be noted from this so I will just list them first. The the states with the most CDs with at least 32% populations with a BA are: California with 18, New York with 13, and then Massachusetts with 8, several states then tie with 7. States not on the list include: Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, N. Dakota, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, S. Carolina, S. Dakota, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

What I found interesting was the heavy concentration in particular areas. Despite its smaller population, the Bay Area in California has nearly as many CDs (8) as the rest of the state (10). Massachusetts is similar in this regard: only two CDs in the state aren’t counted, the entire Boston Metropolitan Area is included. Massachusetts actually has more CDs on this list than Texas (with 3.8x as many people). Boston’s high concentration of respected universities is likely a factor in this, take a glance at this map I found on Radical Cartography of Boston:

Similarly, California’s Bay Area includes Standford University and UC Berkeley, which probably contributes to its high percentage of college graduates. But does my list adequately grasp which parts of the US have the highest concentration of skilled/educated workers? I decided that pruning this list down by making the criteria higher: what congressional districts have a 45% or higher population with at least a Bachelor’s Degree? lets see what we found (my updated list can be found here):

This pruning yields some interesting results. While many metropolitan areas were represented on the former map, this updated map excludes many large cities. only 4 CDs from southern states are listed, which makes them notable. The Research Triangle in North Carolina (a region where UNC, NC State, and Duke intersect) is represented, 2 CDs from the Atlanta metro area and one from Houston are included. The Boston-Washington DC corridor is well represented with 16 CDs, while California has 7. What’s notable about California is that when you raise the threshold to 45% it actually puts the Bay Area on top with 4 CDs, compared to the rest of the state’s 3.

Finally, I wanted to corroborate these findings with a final metric. We know now where the highest concentration of people with at least 4-year degrees are, but where do people who go beyond that tend to live? I took the 30 congressional districts with at least 18% or higher having a Master’s or Professional Degree (think medicine/law/engineering degrees). Here we find similar results with the previous graph:

Here we see that like in the other graph, the Boston-Washington corridor and California are leading the nation with 16 CDs and 7 CDs respectively. In addition to these dominant regions, Seattle, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta, and the NC Research Triangle appear to have to highest concentration of human capital.

Finding out where the largest concentration of human capital is a much easier question to answer than why that concentration exists in the first place. Here are some of my less informed ideas about these maps and why we find concentrations of human capital in a few places. One immediate assumption I had was that these elite regions must have the highest wages in the country and thus attract the most human capital as a result. But surprisingly, the top 30 districts didn’t directly correlate with higher wages. Comparing Income Index with % Master’s/professional degrees produced almost as many mismatches as it did hits. None of the Boston metro districts made it to the top 30 in Income Index and Seattle and 8 others were also not in the top 30 Income Index districts. I am by no means asserting that wages and education don’t correlate here, just that they don’t perfectly correlate this instance.

But some broad observations do appear to hold true: places with more than one elite university in near proximity tend to have more human capital (UC Berkeley+Stanford in the Bay Area, Boston’s plethora of top schools, The Research Triangle’s UNC+Duke, etc.). There also appears to be a based on type of industry for at least a few districts. Microsoft and are headquartered near Seattle and Boeing was headquartered there and still operates a large plant in the region. The importance of Silicon Valley cannot be understated: Facebook, Apple, Google, and Intel are all based there. Washington DC’s role as the epicenter of national political life and most federal agencies makes the region’s concentration of human capital almost inevitable (Imagine the human capital the CIA, FBI, NSA, DoD, DoS attract?). Finally, places of commerce like Houston and Chicago probably attract a great deal of human capital with a combination of incentives.

I think the question of critical importance for regions that lack these advantages in attracting human capital (be it a lack of quality universities or lucrative industries) is to attract human capital using alternative methods. According to one source, making housing attainable in the urban core where they say amenities/diversity/jobs/social life are usually concentrated. A compelling blog was written about attracting smart people to cities that rates cities by their potential and actual college graduates by sq/mile. Personally, I just hope that my city doesn’t get left behind in the zero-sum competition over human capital.

Usually I like to post blogs with specific topics, or at least themes that can unify several ideas/datasets coherently. Right now I’d like instead to write a blog with a few interesting things I’ve found recently.

First, I would like to post this graphic showing healthcare expenditure (% of GDP) over a selection of OECD (a rich nation club) members:

This graph was made using Google’s Public Data Explorer and can be found here. I’ll list the values in case you have trouble accessing the link: France 8.7% of GDP on public health, Germany 8%, US and Netherlands 7.3%, Canada 7.1%, and the UK at 6.9%. I think this is a critical graph when discussion on reforming healthcare in the US takes place. As an OECD country, we spend an average amount on public healthcare alone. But what’s not in this graph is our massive expenditure on private healthcare. Data for this was only available for the year 2007, so I made a different kind of graph:

This graph (also from Google Public Data Explorer) shows the real anomaly of healthcare in the US: despite spending a similar amount on public healthcare as other OECD members, we spend much more on private healthcare. This translates into a combined health expenditure of 16% of GDP for the United States. For comparison, here are the combined expenditures for the other members: France 11%, Germany 10.4%, the Netherlands 9%, Canada 10.1%, the UK 8.4%. This succinctly defines problem that some have with the coverage gap in the US which currently leaves ~15% uninsured and produces a very average life expectancy of 78.37 years (50th best in the world). I don’t want to comment further on this debate as I feel it is well covered in the media if you look in the right places.

Moving on, I would like to move on to another recent interest of mine, academic dick waving. There are two publications that I’ve recently found that list eminent academics in two of my favorite disciplines: International Relations and Economics. The first is a survey (you can find here) that examines: “Teaching, Research, and International Politics.”

When respondents were asked “Please list the four scholars who have had the greatest impact on the field of international relations over the past 20 years.” They found:

Some interesting names here, any names you recognize? When asked “What do you consider the top five terminal masters programs in international relations for students looking to pursue a policy career?” they responded:

Again some very interesting schools on the list.

Now I’d like to move on to Economics using a list from RePEc. Who are RePEc you ask? well “RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 74 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics.” and who do they think are the best economists?

01 Andrei Shleifer

02 Joseph E. Stiglitz

03 James J. Heckman

04 Robert J. Barro

05 Robert E. Lucas Jr.

 06 Peter C. B. Phillips

07 Daron Acemoglu

08 Martin S. Feldstein

09 Jean Tirole

10 Edward C. Prescott

 11 Olivier Blanchard

12 Kenneth S Rogoff

13 Mark L. Gertler

14 Christopher F Baum

15 Paul R. Krugman

16 Thomas J. Sargent

17 John Y. Campbell

18 Lawrence H. Summers

19 Nicholas Cox

20 Barry Julian Eichengreen

21 Ross Levine

22 N. Gregory Mankiw

23 Ben S. Bernanke

24 Robert Ernest Hall

25 Elhanan Helpman

26 Gary S. Becker

27 Robert W. Vishny

28 David E. Card

29 Maurice Obstfeld

30 Michael Woodford

Personally my favorites are Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman (his blog on NYT is excellent).

News about  university rankings has taken an International Relations twist as the EU has angrily criticized two recent rankings and has allocated funding to create a new system. This was in response to a very low ranking of European universities by the UK publication Times Higher Education, and the Shanghai ranking. Having an emerging superpower like China view Europe’s universities so poorly has led to some European education ministers and university presidents to travel to China and express their concerns and promote their universities. Unlike domestic rankings of US universities (we call them colleges : ) have, these international rankings bring the prestige of a nation’s entire higher education system into scrutiny. It makes sense for countries like Germany and France to fret over these results, as both rankings make their  higher education systems appear to be inferior not just to the US model, but to one of the most eurosceptic members of the EU: Britain. The coalition government in Great Britain has been increasingly critical of European (read EU) integration, and the debt crisis has emboldened them continue to use a separate currency and avoid contributing to Eurozone bailouts (the UK is, by far, the largest EU member-state not to use the Euro). Lets see what these two rankings show:

Of the top 100 from the Times Higher Education, here are some results and analysis: (note: I am lazy so the colors don’t match, sorry)

Immediately it is clear that the EUs higher population and GDP (EU-wide, not Eurozone) does not produce as many top 100 universities compared to the US. But this shows only part of the problem.

Half of Europe’s top 100 universities are in the UK, an impressive feat for a country with a smaller economy and population than Germany. The United Kingdom’s GDP and population figures are very closely matched with France who does terribly on this graph. see my link above for complete results.

Finally, when we include Irish, Canadian, and Australian universities lets see how they perform, as the Anglosphere:

Once you include important universities in Canada, Australia and Ireland it appears that the world’s most desired universities are overwhelmingly English-speaking establishments. Perhaps this ranking system favors that unfairly, it is an independent publication, but it is also a British, independent publication. Russia once had a ranking system that appeared reasonable at first glance, until one found Russia’s own Moscow State University ranked higher than Harvard or Cambridge. Lets see how China’s ARWU or Shanghai Ranking rates the same regions.

The Chinese ranking or ARWU has been out since 2003, but it wasn’t until its recent battering of European universities was combined with the THE ranking for 2010 that Europe responded. Here are the same regions being measured by the 2010 ARWU/Shanghai Ranking: (note: I excluded Moscow State University from Europe because Russia’s relationship with the EU is different than Switzerland or Norway’s)

While Europe clearly does better in the ARWU ranking, the US still dominates the top 100.

Separating Britain from the EU has a similarly bad outcome for Europe, though its not as bad for Europe as the THE rankings showed. To break it down more thoroughly: France has 3 universities compared with Britain’s 11, while Germany has 5, and Switzerland somehow ties with France with 3.

Both the ARWU and THE rankings clearly favor English-speaking universities, with both giving them at least 70% of the top 100 in both cases. The ARWU ranking doesn’t rank Irish universities in its top 100, but does rank Canada and Australia’s universities with 4 and 3 respectively. While one might expect China’s East Asian rivalry with Japan to color the ranking’s view of Japanese universities, this isn’t the case: Japan features 5 universities in the top 100, with no Chinese institutions included. Rounding off the list is Russia’s Moscow State University and Israel’s Hebrew University.

The ARWU has also been criticized for favoring sciences much more than humanities, which might explain why many liberal arts colleges perform badly on this list.

Personally, I think ranking an entire university is an incomplete science at best. It’s easy to rank a university’s prestige, but sometimes that prestige doesn’t reflect a particular program’s strength at a university. For instance, Georgetown and Johns Hopkins both have highly esteemed schools of International Relations and Diplomacy but lack the similar prestige of MIT’s hard science programs, so they lose out in a ranking that favors hard sciences. I’d rather not split hairs ad infinitum over ranking systems and instead focus on the IR implications ofthe recent ranking system debacle.

European integration has been viewed by some of its proponents as a means for Europe to remain relevant in an increasingly multi-lateral world. Don’t just take my word for it, academics have written much about it. French and German politicians and academics have been especially eager to use the EU to promote this goal, and as a consequence, have been equally insecure over its prospects. While the Eurozone’s economy is smaller than the US, the entire EU membership has at least matched it recently. This has led outsiders and Europeans alike to eagerly await an example of European leadership. One of these much anticipated examples ended in spectacular failure at the 2009 Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change.

Europeans anticipated this would be a moment where their divergence with the US on climate change could help to underscore Europe’s relevance as an ec0-friendly alternative to US or Chinese dominance; this made the summit’s outcome exceptionally embarrassing. Prior to the opening of the summit itself was a smaller summit within the summit, where Obama negotiated with China as well as Brazil, India, and South Africa. After the summit appeared to be faltering, it was only efforts by China and the US to reconcile their differences with one another that was able to produce a final draft agreement. This was witnessed at the horror of EU enthusiasts, as it confirmed their worst fears of a world dominated by the G-2 (China and America). The fact that Europe’s failure at the summit may have been planned in advance can only add to the frustrations of European leaders. China’s importance at the summit put European aspirations of global leadership in doubt. The Eurozone debt crisis hasn’t helped matters, with Standard & Poor’s recently downgrading Greece’s sovereign debt to one of its lowest ratings.

It might seem like a poor ranking from two subjective lists shouldn’t bother European politicians and university heads as much as it has, but within the context of an increasingly desperate Eurozone debt crisis and a larger global shift towards the BRIC (the IMF predicts China’s GDP in PPP will overtake the US by 2016) it seems reasonable for such insecurities to exist.