I have been thinking about the Draghi report on competition in the EU. He makes a strong case for specific policy proposals. One area of focus is higher education. Our universities are where many of the innovations of the future will first be hatched, yet the EU is falling behind the rest of the world. The US is also falling given the rankings of the top 200 universities. The big winner is China which has seen a strong increase in the number of top universities.
We do not believe that education alone is the driver for innovation, but it provides a strong base. Education is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for innovation and innovation may not translate to competition. Enclosed is a table of data from ARTU, the aggregate ranking of top universities, that is a meta-ranking from a wider set of surveys. These top universities can also be tied to R&D spending. The EU has fewer top universities and R&D spending is less, but the real problem is the fragmentation of education in the EU. Both the US and China have integrate systems while the EU is still focused on country level education and not the EU in total.
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