When the QS World University Rankings first appeared, a decade ago, one of the features that attracted most comment was the performance of the leading Asian universities. There had been a widespread assumption – perhaps even in parts of Asia – that the top universities would all be in North America and Europe.

Instead, both Peking University and the National University of Singapore appeared in the top 20, and Hong Kong and Japan were represented in the top 50. A debate began, which continues to this day, about whether many Asian universities would soon eclipse their Western counterparts.

That debate has intensified as Asian countries such as China, Japan and South Korea have poured money into their leading universities in order to make them more competitive internationally. Their investment has coincided with recession in the West and consequent pressure on higher education budgets there.

Such has been the strength of both of those trends that a new assumption has taken hold: that the ‘rise of Asia’ is now unstoppable, that the newly-wealthy universities of the East are making dramatic progress up the rankings and are already on their way to academic domination. So does the evidence support the new theory any more than the old one?

Plenty of commentators subscribe to it. Jan Figel, for example, then European Union Commissioner for Education, predicted six years ago that leading Chinese universities could overtake the top British institutions within a decade unless there was more investment in higher education in the UK. They may still do so, but in the 2013 QS rankings there were four UK universities in the top ten and six in the top 20. The highest-placed Chinese institution was 46th.

That is not to suggest that Asian universities have failed to improve their standing in the ten years of the rankings. There were 11 in the top 50 for 2013, compared with eight in 2005, the first year in which the current QS methodology applied. A quarter of the top 100 universities are now from Asia, compared with 14 in 2005.

That progress has been most obvious in the last few years of the QS rankings: the number of Asian universities in the top 100 has grown by almost 50 per cent since 2011. But none yet appears in the top ten – indeed, there was no Asian university in the top 20 in 2013.

Professor Bertil Andersson, President of Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore, which is well established in the world’s top 50, expects Asia’s rise to gather pace in the next few years and has predicted that more than a third of the top 100 universities will be from the continent by 2025. As a former head of the European Science Foundation and Nobel Prize judge, he is more objective than most in a politically-charged debate.

It is politically charged because governments in much of Asia – and parts of Europe – have committed huge sums to their leading universities in the hope of reaping long-term economic benefits and for reasons of national prestige. In some countries, the initiatives have also changed the higher education system by channelling a greater proportion of funding to a few universities.

In China, for example, selective funding predates international rankings by almost a decade, when Project 211 identified ‘national key universities’ in 1995. They shared an estimated $2 billion in five years to boost research performance. Now the most generous funding goes to the C9 universities, which receive 10 per cent of all the money China spends on research. Six of them are in the top 200 in the QS World University Rankings, the majority improving their positions in 2013.

Japan has focused on 13 universities in its Global 30 programme, offering incentives to teach degrees in English in order to increase the number of international students and recruit academics who will also publish in English. Korea’s World-Class University programme has many of the same features, while even less wealthy countries such as Thailand and Vietnam have singled out a few universities for special support to make them internationally competitive.

The lesson of the world rankings may be that such programmes require considerable patience on the part of the funding agencies. However much money is available, it takes time to establish the kind of research reputation that will attract the best academics and students from around the world. Some of Asia’s leading universities are only a few decades old and are having to compete with the likes of Harvard and Cambridge, which have traditions of excellence that have been built up over centuries.

There is no doubt, however, that many are rising to that challenge. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, for example, was established only in 1991 and is already in the top 40 in the world. The top five universities under 50 years old in the 2014 QS ranking of this age group are all from Asia.

The ‘rise of Asia’ may not yet be as dramatic as the commentators expected – in terms of rankings, Japan’s universities have been in decline recently and India’s are yet to make their mark; China is not yet the dominant force that Mr Figel and others predicted; Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea continue to make an impact without breaking into the top 20. This will surely change in another ten years, however, if Asia’s investment in its leading universities continues at the current rate.