article: The top places are invariably filled with the US and UK academic powerhouses. And then coming up fast are the ambitious Asian universities. But what about the French, with their centuries of scholarship and ancient institutions? There was a university in Paris before Oxford or Cambridge. French universities are conspicuous by their absence. In the most recent QS World University Rankings there were none in the top 20 and only two in the top 100. That could all change from next year. As part of a huge government-driven academic and economic project, there will be a new university called Paris-Saclay, with a campus south of the French capital. The project has initial funding of 7.5bn euros (Â£5.9bn) for an endowment, buildings and transport links. The French government is bringing together 19 institutions into a single structure, with the aim of building a university big enough to compete with global giants like Harvard or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dominique Vernay, the president of this new university, says that within a decade he wants Paris-Saclay to be among the top ranking world universities. "My goal is to be a top 10 institution," he says. In Europe, he wants Paris-Saclay to be in the "top two or three". In university rankings, big is beautiful, and the Paris-Saclay will have 70,000 students and 10,000 researchers. There will be an emphasis on graduate courses and recruiting more international students and staff. More stories from the BBC's Knowledge economy series looking at education from a global perspective and how to get in touch The idea of bringing together individual colleges into a "federal university" has been borrowed from the UK. "Our model isn't that far from the Oxbridge model," he says. To put it into scale, Mr Vernay says Paris-Saclay is going to be twice the size of the University of California, Berkeley, one of the flagships of the US university system. Without any extra investment, he says that the existing component parts of the university will put Paris-Saclay straight into the top 20 of the Shanghai global university rankings. It will inherit staff with Nobel Prizes and some very well-established founding partners, including the Ecole Polytechnique, the HEC Paris business school and the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). Getting into the top end of the league tables is not the purpose of the investment, he says. But it would be an important indicator of how France can create a much more concentrated and globally competitive research base. The big idea is to create a "knowledge hub" around Paris, bringing together top-level universities with research institutes, hi-tech businesses and start-ups. The classic example of such a project would be Silicon Valley in California where Stanford University has been the launchpad for firms such as Google and Hewlett Packard. Boston would be seen as another such hi-tech cluster, with Harvard and MIT feeding ideas into technology firms. In London, Imperial College and University College London are planning expansions to tap into this drive for innovation. But in this industrial geography of the internet age, with the
summary: Imagine the chagrin of French universities whenever international rankings are published.