Beijing’s Tsinghua University was recently listed across multiple global rankings as the number one place in the world to learn computer science and engineering.
While in some other global rankings, Tsinghua University hasn’t yet climbed to the top spot, it always features in the top 20 universities.
Tsinghua has steadily climbed the rankings to be one of the premier universities in the world over the last few decades, a testament to China’s overall advancement in education and technology.
Some consider this recent global ranking shift as perhaps a watershed moment where China will start to eclipse the lead that US and UK institutions have held over the university rankings for all of modern history.
Some analysts discuss this part of the greater collapse of Western domination in science and education and whether they will now further fall behind as China attracts more and more talents across the world in the realm of technological knowledge and pursuit.
According to CSRankings results, a computer science ranking website, since 2021, Tsinghua University has overtaken Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA for the top spot. CSRankings weighs institutions by faculty publications used in high-tier conferences across many categories such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, cryptography, robotics and many more.
China now claims 4 spots in the top 10 for computer science institutions. Comparing to 25 years ago in 2000, Chinese institutions didn’t even feature in the top 10, and only had 3 in the top 100. Now China boasts 22 universities in the top 100 over the past five years.
Much of this achievement can be credited to how education is an incredibly important part of Chinese culture now, and that once China managed to climb economically out of the dire situations post WW2, it allowed the populace to focus on improving their education to such an extent that they’ve become world leaders in many disciplines in a relatively short period of time.
In many surveys, when you ask the Chinese youth, what they want to be when they grow up, they answer with “doctor”, “engineer”, “scientist”, “astronaut”, and other exceptional roles that not only hold an advanced society together but continue to push it forward to greater heights. But when you ask the Western youth what they want to become, the answers are far different: “Youtuber”, “basketball player”, “musician”, “online streamer”. Essentially they want to be involved in entertainment and not in anything educational, therefore the education system itself struggles to motivate such youths who want nothing to do with “boring” subjects such as maths or science.
Western society has risen to great heights over this modern era, but now it finds itself mired in decadence, frivolity, temporary enjoyment and even backwards thinking. The benefits of democracy and capitalism have been taken advantage of and twisted by an oligarchy eager to pitch the working class against each other in order to cement their power for the oncoming advanced technological age of robotics and AI.
A society’s direction is based on its younger generation’s dreams and aspirations, and the current prevalent dreams in the West are for the youth to aspire to all be entertainers, drawn in by the religion of celebrity that has brainwashed repeated generations.
Of course, being an entertainer is not a terrible thing for a part of society to aspire to, but a society is not built upon entertainment; it will clearly collapse under such misguided endeavours.
Will China continue to eclipse Western institutions in various technological fields, or will this advancement spark competition and fear in the West, who might wake up from their lack of progress in so many areas? It remains unclear, but if nothing changes, Chinese institutions will continue to plough ahead and reap the rewards of their hard work.
