How Australian universities really fare in rankings

How Australian universities really fare in rankings

The recent 2020 Global MBA Rankings revealed that Australian universities are among the leading global institutions providing quality education.

In 2019, seven Australian universities made it in the QS World University Rankings’ top 100, while nine made it to the world’s top 50 ‘young universities.’

The Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings 2020 also shows Australia’s strong performance — with 19 of the 35 participating universities ranking higher than the previous year and only five of these posting declines.

However, with so many scoring systems ranking universities globally, the University of New South Wales Sydney (UNSW) developed a new system which can show the definite rankings of universities both in Australia and overseas.

The Aggregate Ranking of Top Universities (ARTU) showed 1,614 universities covered by QS, THE, and Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) in 2019. These three stand out among various scoring systems which rank universities globally.

UNSW Sydney president and vice-chancellor Professor Ian Jacobs, and deputy vice-chancellor (research) Professor Nicholas Fisk said that their meta-ranking makes the presentation order simple and “easily digestible.”

UNSW instead ordered universities through their aggregate score, adding their rankings according to THE, ARWU and QS data. This gives a “more realistic reflection” of a university’s standing, Jacobs and Fisk said.

Leading the recent ARTU rankings is Stanford University, followed by two other US-based tertiary institutions Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

Leading Australian institutions is the University of Melbourne (UniMelb), which ranked 31st in the ARTU. UniMelb is followed by the Australian National University, University of Queensland and the University of Sydney, which ranked 41st, 45th and 49th, respectively.

Other Australian universities which made it to the top 200 are as follows:

Monash University - 54th place
UNSW Sydney - 55th place
University of Western Australia - 90th place
University of Adelaide - 104th place
Newcastle University - 166th place
University of Technology Sydney - 177th place
Macquarie University - 187th place
University of Wollongong - 188th place
Curtin University - 199th place
Queensland University of Technology - 200th place