Articles by Philip G Altbach

A bunch of international ranking systems to evaluate universities exist today across the world. Flaws and generalisations persist in all of them, but railing against them will not make them go away. Competition, the need to benchmark and the inevitable logic of globalisation make them a lasting part of the academic landscape of the 21st century. The challenge is to understand the nuances and uses - and misuses - of the rankings.

With India and China aiming to build more sophisticated economies, both countries are giving priority to higher education to produce highly educated personnel and high quality research. This paper makes a comparative assessment of the development of the higher education system in the two countries, the challenges being faced and what the future holds for both countries. China has made considerable progress with its top institutions and India has illustrated with the Indian Institutes of Technology and a few other institutions that high standards are possible. Yet, the problem of quality, and the related issues of whether the graduates are qualified for the labour market, remain. It seems that China and India will, at the least, not see significant reform in the overall academic quality of higher education. An effective quality-assurance system can help to ensure standards, but neither country has such a system in place currently capable of overall supervision. The systems will probably become more stratified, with a small number of research universities at the top and very large numbers of fairly unselective colleges and universities at the bottom.

India and China in World Knowledge System Philip G Altbach AT first glance, these two large and important countries would seem to be well positioned for scientific leadership, and in fact they have achieved considerable success. China and India have relatively well developed scientific infrastructures today, including scientific laboratories, universities, a network of scientific journals, and large number of scientists and researchers India, in fact, is the third world's scientific superpower in terms of number of qualified scientists, and China is not far behind. Both have a long scientific tradition

to the third world" (pp 398-99). This needed saying, and l can understand his indignation. Many years ago, I came across such a western radical's review of a book written by an Indian on Marxian political economy (with specific applications to the conditions of developed and underdeveloped capita- lisms and socialisms). Inter alia, this western radical questioned the right of an Indian to analyse conditions under developed socialism, without, of course, forgoing his own right to do so! But it is fortunately not true that all western radicals are like Kalidas when he was trying hard to cut off the branch of the tree on which he was sitting. It is not quite true that all of them enjoy attacking 'existing socialism' because 'it does not spell any danger for them'. There are some who do realise the danger for them if socialism is obliterated, since they are urgently concerned to escape from the black future of developed capitalist societies. They criticise 'existing socialist societies' more in sorrow than in anger, as does Das Gupta himself.

Philip G Altbach The US presidential campaign which has been going on for at least a year, has seen some, surprising twists. While the road from May to the party conventions in August seems pretty clear what will happen after that is quite murky.