Australian universities take a dive with Monash as their sinking anchor

Why are we not surprised? The overall performance of Australian universities has been dropping steadily in the last 5 years and possibly even longer as The Times Higher Education University Rankings started taking data only in 2004. In the latest published results Australian universities have taken a dramatic dive this year with only University of Melbourne and University of Adelaide keeping up the good work, or should I say keeping up with the rest of the world.

Monash University dropped by an astounding 133 places since 2009 while UNSW was lowered by 105. In their steps followed University of Queensland (by 40), University of Sydney (by 35), Macquarie University (by 31) and also, as shocking as it may seem, ANU dropped by 26 places! Graph below;

Figure 1 – Australian (top 10 for 2009) universities world ranking for the 2005-2010 period as based on The Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

RMIT may have dropped only 1 spot this year but that’s not to discard its somewhat steady deterioration from 82^nd rank in 2005 to 224^th rank in 2010. Same goes for Macquarie University which went down from 62^nd position in 2005 to 220^th in 2010.

It’s interesting to note that only University of Adelaide has managed to climb the ladder in 2010, albeit by only 8 spots. University of Melbourne remains strong at rank 36, also becoming Australia’s #1 university for 2010. This great performance by University of Melbourne can be traced back to their 2007/2008 university plan which was put in motion at the start of 2008. Well done University of Melbourne!

The Times Higher Education methodology for ranking universities takes into account: research income from industry against staff numbers, ratio of international to domestic students, ratio of international to domestic staff, undergraduate entrants, PhDs/undergraduate degrees awarded, reputation survey (teaching), institutional income, academic papers, citation impact, research income, research income from public sources and reputation survey (research). How each of these is weighted can be found at wiki or at The Times’ HE official website.

Now, I don’t wish to imply anything overly speculative but it seems like the whole educational system has been in steady decline for a number of years. I’m having a déjà vu here, it’s almost as if I predicted so in a previous blog post, weird. It couldn’t be that the might tertiary entrance rank is backfiring, surely. After all, these university rankings are only partly based on degrees awarded, undergraduate entrants and ratio of international to domestic students…

We can only wait and hope now, if this doesn’t teach anyone anything then maybe the next drop of 100 places might.