This week, THE announced that Thailand, Argentina, Chile, Turkey, Iran, Colombia and Serbia (TACTICS) had the potential to become higher-education stars.
“TACTICS have a higher average proportion of university-aged students enrolled in higher education than BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa], and greater average research quality,” Phil Baty, THE rankings editor, said.
“This means that this new crop of potential higher education global powers that haven’t really been discussed before are, on average, better than BRICS in terms of higher education,” he explained.
His opinion is based on research that THE conducted in partnership with University College London (UCL)’s Centre for Global Higher Education.
According to the study, Thailand has the third-highest research output compared to other TACTICS countries, representing a growth of 11 per cent between 2011 and 2015. Its research quality is also very close to the world average, with a field-weighted citation impact of 0.94.
Chile’s publication output rose by 36 per cent between 2011 and 2015 – the second-highest growth among TACTICS countries. It is also the only country with a higher level of research quality than the world average of 1.08.
Iran has also had the highest publication output between 2011 and 2015, publishing more than 200,000 research papers.
Overall, TACTICS countries have higher research output, with at least 30,000 papers published a year, have at least one university in the THE World University Rankings 2016-17 and have a field-weighted citation impact (a measure of publication quality) of at least 0.75 versus the world average.
Simon Marginson, UCL’s director of the Centre for Global Higher Education, said “the crucial feature of rising national higher education systems is that they combine the rapid growth of participation … with emerging science systems in which published papers are growing as fast as enrolments. They are building world-class universities and lifting mass economic and social literacy at the same time.”
Nine universities in Thailand were included in the World Rankings 2016-17, and seven included in Asia’s top 200 universities. The top three Thai universities listed in the Asian region are Mahidol University (#90), King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi (#98) and Chiang Mai University (141 – 150).
Baty, however, pointed out that despite Thailand’s strong international outlook, “the political crisis in 2013-14 held back the nation’s universities and the government has been less committed in investing in higher education”, resulting in a poor research environment. He also suggested that an increase in Thai academic research papers written in the global language of English, could help boost Thailand’s reputation for higher education.