A Quantitative Comparative Study of Country University Competitiveness as Illustrated by the Countries of the Near East.

A comparative study of the university systems of the countries of the Near East has been undertaken in this paper. It has been illustrated that the most competitive systems in terms of World University Rankings are the university systems of Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. This conclusion, at a glance, was made based on the distribution of all the universities of 14 countries of the Near East by the ten World University Rankings. This conclusion was confirmed in a more detailed manner upon entering and calculating three integral indicators of country university competitiveness. They were expressed by multiplying and adding the number of the universities of the countries mentioned in the rankings mentioned above and the average values of the positioning of the universities in these systems. Together with the number of universities distributed among the countries, these three indicators correlated well with each other. The devised methodology of a quantitative assessment of country university competitiveness is proposed for a comparative study of this competitiveness in random groups of countries worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]