> How many German universities are ranked top 40 globally? How many American?
University rankings are mostly nonsense. They generally over-weight English speaking universities because most of the "high impact" journals are in English. The UK also does well by these metrics, but fundamentally academic research and teaching are very different things, and incentivising high output research institutions to focus on the research breaks the social purpose of universities which is to turn out educated undergraduates.
The German model is to focus more on teaching, which is a more sustainable approach than chasing the finite research dollars.
University rankings are mostly nonsense. They generally over-weight English speaking universities because most of the "high impact" journals are in English. The UK also does well by these metrics, but fundamentally academic research and teaching are very different things, and incentivising high output research institutions to focus on the research breaks the social purpose of universities which is to turn out educated undergraduates.
The German model is to focus more on teaching, which is a more sustainable approach than chasing the finite research dollars.