Adjusted sum of institutional scores as an indicator of the presence of university systems in the ARWU ranking

In this article I introduce a new indicator that measures the presence of a higher education system in the Shanghai Jiao Tong Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). First, the benefits of introducing such a measure and the drawbacks associated with the possible choices of the indicator are discussed. To analyze the drawbacks, the sample of countries with presence in ARWU is split into two groups of small and large world’s GDP share. A raw indicator based upon the sum of the scores of all the universities from a country divided by its world’s GDP share shows a noticeable bias in favor of small countries, so a one-way between-groups analysis of variance is conducted to help in canceling the bias. That leads to the introduction of a new aggregate indicator that can be computed in a very simple fashion. A discussion of the performance of higher education systems using this new indicator closes the paper.