The Times Higher Education Supplement was released in October last year. This caused some interesting discussion in Hong Kong, as the University of Hong Kong flaunted its ranking of 35th, the highest in the SAR. (Its closest competitors, CU and UST, ranked 50th and 58th respectively.) As a part of this rating were scores based on the proportion of faculty and students that are international. I'm not really sure why international faculty and students are so important, but apparently they mean that the university is better. I think, if anything, students and faculty that are not proficient in the language in which their institutions operate impede education. Take for example the dialogue that occurred in an epidemiology class today:

Me: What did he just say?
Person beside me has a blank look.
Me: I heard, "You wouldn't buy before you borrow."
Person beside me: I heard something about a bomb.

Neither what I heard nor what the person beside me heard would have made sense in the context of actuarial methods of calculating disease incidence, which is what I think the professor was lecturing about at the time. And the rest of the lecture I kept on trying to figure out what he said. Alas, I came up with nothing intelligent. I'm sure that he's a brilliant professor and has made wonderful contributions to his field. But if some of what makes a tertiary institution a top university is its ability to pass on knowledge to the students that attend, I'm not really sure that proportions of internationals really as anything to do with it at all.