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Reverse trend
Australian unis drop in latest ARWU university rankings
By Tim Dodd
Australia ’ s top universities have been brought back to earth by the latest Academic Ranking of World Universities ( ARWU ), 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 , NSW , Monash , ANU , and the University of WA ( UWA ) – remain in the top 100 but all have dropped in rank except UWA , which has retained last year ’ s position at 99th .
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 most highly ranked 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 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-19 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
The slide in rankings follows the spending cuts universities imposed when the pandemic hit
research outputs . Its measures include a university ’ s number of Nobel-prize winners , highly cited researchers and papers published in top journals .
Prior to covid , 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 ; Massachusetts Institute of Technology ; Cambridge ; University of California , Berkeley ; Princeton ; Oxford ; Columbia ; California Institute of Technology ; and Chicago , in that order .
The top 10 list is unchanged from last year . ■
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