Universities face Asian challenge

There was more good news than bad in Wednesday’s World University Rankings, from education marketing agency QS. You would never know it from all the complaints.

QS looks at statistics on teaching and research resources, and surveys academics and employers to create competitive scores for individual universities across the world. The main purpose is to give young people who want to study in another country a guide to where will suit them. This year, as normal, Australia did very well, with nine universities in the global top 100. Of our three big competitors, the US had 26 and Britain seven. Canada, the market that most resembles Australia, had just four.

Individual universities’ positions bounce around from year to year due to statistical variances more than anything a student on campus would notice. A place anywhere in the top 100 is a good-as-gold result. The University of Melbourne dropped six places to 19th this year but remained first in Australia and up with the world’s biggest university brands, Oxford and Harvard, Cambridge and Caltech (California Institute of Technology). Overall, 36 Australian universities make the complete QS list, third in the world behind the US and UK.

It is a win for university marketers – there is a mass of specifics in the QS rankings, giving international sales teams something to celebrate. But you would never know it from much of the commentary, which declared doom at 25 Australian universities with lower overall scores than last year. Staff at odds with their universities’ management blamed drops on everything from vice-chancellors’ pay to inadequate government funding. But for academics with axes to grind, the salaries are always deemed too high and funding too low. Opposition education spokesman Jonno Duniam played politics: “Despite huge funding injections into the sector, the Albanese government’s approach is not working,” he said. But as universities are autonomous in managing the measures QS ranks (such as research output and teaching), it is hard to see why it is anything to do with Education Minister Jason Clare.

There is, however, genuinely bad news in these rankings. Australian universities are not getting worse as much as competing institutions, especially in Asia, are getting better. China and Singapore have long had universities that outperform many of ours. Now QS reports that Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam have “recorded significant gains”. Changes in one year’s relative scores do not matter – the challenge is to stop a slide over the next 10.