The Road to Academic Excellence: Lessons of Experience

Abstract

Synthesizes common themes and lessons learned from the case studies of the universities which have achieved outstanding results, shown promising signs of success, or faced reversals of fortune, and explains the success factors of top research universities. Three sets of factors determine the performance of research universities: concentration of talent, sufficient funding, and good governance. As far as paths of development, the four institutions that seem to have been the most successful—Indian Institutes of Technology, National University of Singapore, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Pohang University of Science and Technology—are all relatively new institutions. Their trajectory would tend to demonstrate that it is easier to reach academic excellence by establishing a new research university than by attempting to upgrade an existing one. It is much less complicated, in particular, to set up a favorable governance framework for a new institution than to try to transform the mode of operation of existing institutions, as the Malaysian case indicates.

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