Top Australian universities slide down world rankings

Australia’s top universities have slipped down the world’s most prestigious academic league table, with every institution in the top 200 recording a lower rank than 12 months ago.

The slide down the Times Higher Education rankings comes after an overhaul of the methodology used to score universities, but analysts say Australia’s poor performance is because of a research funding shortfall as well as student to staff ratios, which are among the worst in the world.

The University of Sydney dropped six places to rank 60th in the world; behind the University of Melbourne, which dropped three places to 37th on the list; and Monash University, which dropped 10 places to 54th.

Australian National University dropped five places to 67th spot; the University of NSW dropped 13 places to 84th; and the University of Technology, Sydney dropped 15 places to rank 148th.

Times Higher Education chief global affairs officer Phil Baty said Australian universities had been outpaced by research investment of other institutions while a drop-off in international students from 30 to 26 per cent meant revenue and consequentially research funding had taken a hit.

“We’ve seen the rise of mainland Chinese and east Asian universities ... Australia does not have the same level of the same drive and level of commitment,” he said.

The University of Sydney is among the best 60 universities in the world – just –but it has slipped in the rankings.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone

“In addition, while the rankings show Australia has historically very high levels of research quality, current figures show a relative under-investment in research, which sends a clear red-light warning.”

The student-to-staff ratio in Australian universities is among the worst in the world, with the index finding they are in the bottom 15 per cent of the 1900 institutions assessed.

“Student ratios were already low, but it has become lower because of a spate of redundancies at universities over the past few years,” Baty said.

Oxford University’s Professor of Higher Education Simon Marginson said he disliked the Times rankings because there was no rationale for the mix and ratio of the weightings. Meanwhile, he said survey responses from academics were subjective and often unduly amplified some trends.

“The country should worry about its research capacity – and the risks of an overdependence on market incomes in research – but the Times Higher ranking itself with its especially sudden lurches up and down is not the issue, and the down trend in 2023 is almost certainly exaggerated,” he said.

Most top-ranked research countries had their science research funded by government, Marginson said. But in Australia, about 30 per cent of the research capacity of universities before the pandemic was being carried by international student fees. “The Australian formula worked fine as long as foreign fee revenues increase year-on-year, but markets have downs as well as ups.”

University of Melbourne Professor Michael Wesley, who this year wrote a book Mind of the Nation: Universities in Australian Life, cautioned that within Australia, a high ranking was not necessarily a proxy for a good education.

Professor Michael Wesley said wealthier universities had a greater capacity to embark on research, which in turn pushed them up rankings tables.Credit: Arsineh Houspian

“For some students, the ranking matters and the prestige matters. But there will be a vast number who don’t care and don’t know and want a good accessible education,” he said.

“There is quite a clear correlation between the wealth of a university and the ability to conduct the sorts of activities that will bring it a higher ranking.

“My own view is there is a great virtue in having a variety of higher education options– I don’t think it is a bad thing that all Australian universities are not highly ranked.”

The top universities internationally were Britain’s Oxford University, followed by Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.

There are numerous lists of university rankings published each year but the Times index is considered to be the most prestigious. Rankings are based on a mix of subjective and objective measures, including how often research is cited in publications and surveys of the opinions of academics across the globe.

The Quacquarelli Symonds rankings published earlier this year saw the University of Sydney and the University of NSW climb into the top 20, but that was after technical changes to how those rankings were calculated, including the introduction of a section on sustainability.

The Times rankings methodology was overhauled. From this year on, fewer academics were allowed to vote for their own university in the survey, the results of which make up about a third of an institution’s score. How often a university’s research is cited in patents went from making up 2.5 per cent of an institution’s score to 4 per cent. Universities are scored across 18 indicators across the five pillars of teaching, research environment, research quality, industry and international outlook.

While the University of Sydney’s overall rank had dropped slightly, its deputy vice-chancellor Professor Emma Johnston said its performance in a number of categories had lifted.

“I was particularly pleased that the University of Sydney’s highest ranked pillar is research environment, which saw us move from 62nd to 54th internationally,” she said.

“Australia’s future workforce will need education and expertise driven by the latest research, which is why we committed to research excellence, tackling the greatest challenges and contributing to the common good in our new 10-year strategy.”

University of NSW Professor Nicholas Fisk, deputy vice chancellor research and enterprise, blamed the methodology overhaul for the drop in Australia’s performance.

He pointed to issues with who could complete the institutional reputation surveys and questioned how staff-to-student ratios were calculated.

“Another manipulation was how the staff-student ratio was normalised. Australian universities suffered here even though they may have improved their actual ratio,” he said.

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