Isolation warning as Australian unis slide in international rankings

Overall, Australia had one university in the top 50, six in the top 100 and 11 in the top 200.

Phil Baty, THE’s chief global affairs officer, said this year’s rankings provided some warning signs for Australian universities.

“First of all, while Australia is one of the world’s leading university sectors for attracting international talent and collaboration, the relative isolation of the country during the pandemic is showing up in the data, to detrimental effect on universities’ ranking positions,” Mr Baty said.

“Real attention is needed to ensure Australia continues to be open to international talent, which includes the right policy incentives as competition for international talent heats up with possible shifts in the market.”

As the university sector continues to lobby the Albanese government to provide more reliable research funding, Mr Baty said Australia’s historically high levels of research quality would be potentially undermined by a “relative underinvestment in research, which sends a clear red-light warning”.

Melbourne University vice chancellor Duncan Maskell said the change in methodology on how reputation scores were calculated had resulted in the downward spiral for all Australian universities.

“The University of Melbourne’s exceedingly high scores in all research-related indicators reflect the outstanding work of the staff at the university and its affiliated institutions,” Professor Maskell said.

It was important to acknowledge the different approaches to rankings and how they were measured.

“There are many surveys that are released during the year that rely on different methods to determine university rankings,” he said.

“Changes to these methods which often increase or reduce the weighting applied to specific indicators can have a positive or negative effect on rankings.”

Melbourne University is Australia’s highest-ranked institution across three of the major global rankings: QS (14), Academic Ranking of World Universities (32) and THE (37). It is also first in Australia on the Leiden ranking of scientific research, placed at 28.

Globally, the US accounted for seven of the top 10 universities, but the UK took out the top spot with Oxford.

It was followed by Stanford, Massachussetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, Cambridge and Princeton.