Abstract
Universities and higher education institutions form an integral part of the national infrastructure and prestige. As academic research benefits increasingly from international exchange and cooperation, many universities have increased investment in improving and enabling their global connectivity. Yet, the relationship of university performance and its global physical connectedness has not been explored in detail. We conduct, to our knowledge, the first large-scale data-driven analysis into whether there is a correlation between university relative ranking performance and its global connectivity via the air transport network. The results show that local access to global hubs (as measured by air transport network betweenness) strongly and positively correlates with the ranking growth (statistical significance in different models ranges between 5% and 1% level). We also found that the local airport’s aggregate flight paths (degree) and capacity (weighted degree) has no effect on university ranking, further showing that global connectivity distance is more important than the capacity of flight connections. We also examined the effect of local city economic development as a confounding variable and no effect was observed suggesting that access to global transportation hubs outweighs economic performance as a determinant of university ranking. The impact of this research is that we have determined the importance of the centrality of global connectivity and, hence, established initial evidence for further exploring potential connections between university ranking and regional investment policies on improving global connectivity.
Highlights
Universities have existed for over 1000 years, and represent a community of academics, teachers, students and administrators.12017 The Authors
Universities ranked from 101 to 500 were sorted by the score on the five variables taken into consideration by Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) (Alumni, Award, HiCi, NS, PUB and PCP) and reported the correlations associated to the five ways of sorting
We set out to quantify the effect of air transport connectivity on local university ranking performance
Summary
Universities have existed for over 1000 years, and represent a community of academics, teachers, students and administrators.. Over 26 000 higher education institutions exist worldwide. Higher education remains one of the 2 strongest growing and most resilient economic sectors. In the UK alone, universities generate over $40 billion (3% of GDP) and employ 3% of the workforce. Universities form a part of key national and regional infrastructure
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