By Jordan Baker
Australia’s top universities have risen in the latest international rankings, with the universities of Sydney and Melbourne breaking into the top 40 and the Australian National University declared the 27th-best institution in the world.
But the 2022 Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) rankings, which are the world’s most widely read, let universities use pre-COVID international student data for one of its key measures, so they do not reflect the impact of the pandemic on student mobility, revenue or staffing.
Other pandemic consequences – such as curtailed research due to less funding from overseas student fees – may not be evident in the rankings for several years.
Australian universities have climbed in global rankings. Credit: Michele Mossop
The University of Sydney rose from 40th to 38th, and the University of New South Wales climbed one spot to 43rd. Macquarie University entered the top 200 for the first time since 2009 due to improvements in its reputation.
The University of Technology Sydney (133) and the University of Newcastle (197) held their positions, while the University of Wollongong slightly improved to 193. Overall, 16 universities improved, 11 declined, and nine were in the same position as last year.
Improvements at the Australian National University – whose vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt last year criticised rankings for distorting universities’ decisions – were attributed to its reputation with employers, its research and its international faculty.
QS director of research Ben Sowter said Australia’s success was due to its appeal to the global academic community.
“Falls in international enrolments – particularly from its two biggest markets, China and India – will not only present a financial threat to its institutions … but will also jeopardise the intellectual diversity and exchange that are causing Australia’s institutions to thrive,” he said.
The QS rankings measure an institution’s citations, its faculty-student ratio, its proportion of overseas faculty, the number of overseas students, and its reputation among employers and academics from other universities. It uses either 2019-20 or 2020 data.
In the past year, many universities have laid off staff. Universities Australia estimates 17,500 people lost their jobs, and that does not include casual staff.
This year, universities were also allowed to submit their pre-pandemic or 2019-2020 overseas student data, so the 2022 rankings do not reflect the huge impact on students moving around the world as campuses and borders closed due to COVID-19.
They will also be allowed to skip their 2020 data for the 2023 rankings.
Australia is likely to wait longer than most countries to revive its international market, given strict border closures that the industry expects will not allow students to return in any significant numbers until the middle of next year.
While Chinese students are remaining loyal to the top eight institutions, many students from India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka who attended second-tier and regional universities are looking elsewhere, partly due to their need to work while studying.
One key competitor, Britain, is offering more attractive migration pathways than Australia, while the US Congress is considering a plan to fast-track migration for overseas students who study a science-based course at a US university.
“The longer our borders stay closed, we are increasingly becoming uncompetitive,” said Phil Honeywood, the chief executive of the International Education Association of Australia.
“Education agents who channel more than 80 per cent of full-fee international students are actively encouraging [students] to transfer to Canada, the US and UK.”
Universities were given an extra $1 billion in research funding to meet the shortfall arising from lost international student fee revenue in 2020. But there was no extra money in this year’s budget. “That will cause serious problems,” said Andrew Norton, professor in the practice of higher education at the Australian National University.
“Research was still booming until early 2020, it will be two or three years before the impact of the pandemic starts to show. Possibly even longer, just because of the long cycle these things are on.
“Particularly the citations. It takes a long time for the research to be done, the findings to be published, and other people to cite them.”
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