The Higher Education Policy Institute (www.hepi.ac.uk) has published the results of its seventh annual Soft-Power Index.
The Index measures the number of serving world leaders (monarchs, presidents and prime ministers) educated at a higher level in countries other than their own.
- In the first year of the Index (2017), there were more world leaders who had been educated in the UK tertiary sector than in any other country, including the US. But the US overtook the UK in 2018 and extended its lead in each of the four subsequent years – in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022.
- The new results for 2023 show, in contrast, that the gap between the number of current world leaders educated in the US and the UK has shrunk for the first time since the Index began: compared to last year, there are two more countries with a leader educated in the UK and two fewer countries with a leader educated in the US, reducing the gap by four.
- However, there are still seven more world leaders educated in the US (65), including the UK’s Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, than in the UK (58). Over the years, the gap has shifted from -1 in 2017, to +1 in 2018, +3 in 2019, +5 in 2020, +7 in 2021 and +11 in 2022 but is now back down to +7 in 2023.
- There are 195 countries in the world and around one-quarter of them (54 or 28%) have at least one very senior leader who was educated in the US while a similar number (53 or 27%) have at least one very senior leader who was educated in the UK. As there is some overlap, with a handful of leaders being educated in both the UK and the US, the total number of countries with a very senior leader who has been educated at a higher level in the US and / or the UK is 84 (43% of the world’s countries).
