Nearly all top Australian unis are losers in latest university rankings

After a dream run, nearly all of Australia’s leading universities have lost ground in the latest world academic rankings.

The University of Melbourne tops the list of Australian universities in the 2023 Academic Ranking of World Universities. Picture: David Geraghty

Australia’s top universities have been brought back to earth by the latest Academic Ranking of World Universities, with nearly all losing ground in the prestigious listing that ranks universities on their output of high quality research.

In this year’s list, the same seven Australian universities – Melbourne, Queensland, Sydney, UNSW, Monash, ANU and the University of WA – remain in the top 100 but all have dropped in rank except UWA, which, at 99th, is in the same position as last year.

Melbourne dropped from 32nd to 35th, Queensland went from 47th to 50th, UNSW from 64th to 71st, Sydney from 60th to 72nd, Monash from 75th to 76th, and ANU from 79th to 83rd.

Australia’s next best institution, the University of Adelaide, also suffered, falling from the 101-150 bracket into the 151-200 range even as plans progress for it to merge with the low-ranked University of South Australia (in the 501-600 bracket), which will drag its ranking down further.

The University of Western Australia held onto its ranking inside the top 100.

The slide in rankings follows the spending cuts universities imposed on themselves when the pandemic hit in 2020, which reduced research staff levels, and the Covid lockdowns, which slowed many research programs.

The ARWU rankings contrast sharply with the QS World University Rankings released in June which, after changing their methodology in a way that favoured Australia, placed an unprecedented three Australian institutions into the world’s top 20 and nine into the top 100.

This year’s ARWU results halt a long improving trend for top Australian universities, which rode on the 2014-19 Chinese student boom and poured the fee revenues they earned into research programs.

The extra spending on research had a major impact on the research-based ARWU ranking, which judges universities solely on the quality and volume of research outputs. Its measures include a university’s number of Nobel prizewinners, highly cited researchers and papers published in top journals.

Four universities in particular – Melbourne, Queensland, Sydney, and UNSW – all with strength in the Chinese market, made improvements in their ARWU ranking, which then attracted more Chinese students.

Globally, the ARWU lists the world’s top 10 universities as Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Cambridge, Berkeley, Princeton, Oxford, Columbia, Caltech and Chicago, in that order.

The top 10 list is unchanged from last year.