The United States was ranked the “best” country for higher education by Universitas 21, which may come as little surprise given the numerous worldwide-university rankings published each year that highlight US institutions. Take the Times Higher Education, for example, which featured seven US universities in the top 10 on this year’s list.
The US ranked in the top five for three of the four components taken into consideration for the overall ranking: fourth in terms of resources, third for environment, first for output, and a somewhat surprising 36th for connectivity. The low connectivity ranking (which only counted for 10 percent of the overall ranking) may reflect a relatively small reliance on international student enrollment in US institutions, or the existence of a large population of researchers in the US who rely less critically on collaboration with the international research community, according to the Universitas 21 report.
The implications of the US’s connectivity ranking may be changing however, as higher education in the US has developed into a top service-sector export over the past few years.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
