Global University Rankings Systems

Students are increasingly more focussed on the development of their academic and personal skills in order to be more competitive in job market, and more globally prepared. This is particularly true of the emerging economies in Asia. Students compete for the best institutions at home, and increasingly at better universities overseas. 

Universities are similarly under pressure to adapt. Universities throughout the world are facing increased competition for staff, students, research funding, philanthropy and operational funding. This competition has expanded from intellectual centres in Europe and North America, to rapidly important centres of excellence in Asia, Australasia and South America. All universities are under pressure to improve their performance, with many adopting standings in world university rankings as a measure of that improvement. Competition for international students and income, for research talent and staff, and for scarce funding is elevating the status of the rankings.  

The current international trend is to determine the quality of a university through world ranking systems, provided by various international institutions. The ranking systems typically referenced by the community are The Academic Ranking of World Universities by Shanghai Jiao Tong University (ARWU), The QS World University Ranking and The Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE).

The use of ranking systems as a reference to determine the quality of a university has raised a long debate amongst education experts and scholars around the world. There is extensive criticism related to each of the systems. For students, parents, student advisors, and academic experts, it is important to get a rudimentary understanding of the ranking system in order to use the data proportionally. 

Saksara can help you to better understand the rankings and what they mean for you.

Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA)

Several higher education jurisdictions around the world have undertaken a comprehensive nationwide review of the quality of institutional research. This began in the UK, with the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), in the USA with the National Research Council Rankings, and in Australia with the Excellence in Research Australia Project (ERA). Better understanding the Australian ERA project can make you better informed about your study choices, whether that be undergraduate, postgraduate, or research level studies. It can also guide those seeking research or industry collaborations. 

The point of the Australian ERA project is to identify and promote excellence across both discovery and applied research within Australian higher education institutions. One of the advantages of this project for prospective international coursework and research candidates, is that it provides a valuable tool for the assessment of research in a chosen and identified discipline cluster. 

The ERA indicators involve extensive consultation with the range of disciplines across the sector. All Australian universities submitted comprehensive information on their research activities for ERA 2018-2019 — including detailed data in relation to more than 500,000 publications and other research outputs, more than 75,000 research staff, more than $10 billion of external research income, and more than 1000 patents. Over 1,000 leading researchers from Australia and abroad participated in the assessment process as evaluation committee members or peer reviewers.

The results are incredibly useful for all students, particularly prospective PhD and masters by research candidates, and for prospective industry collaborators and institutional partners. The data allows you to examine a broad area of research, for example environmental sciences, and assess an institutions overall capabilities. It then also allows you to examine a more specific sub-discipline, like soil science, management, or ecological applications. This broad and more refined analysis is useful in establishing considerations for future decisions you may make. 

Another point to consider when examining the data is that only disciplines within a university were assessed if they could present a minimum threshold of data, which for citation analysis, was 50 peer review journal articles. So… If a university received a rating of 5, which is well above world standard, then this assessment was made on the basis of at least 50 peer reviewed journal articles within a six year review window. This low volume threshold increases the validity of the data in terms of research quality. 

Like with all of these ratings, or rankings exercises, they are not the complete picture, but they do provide you with data to make a more informed choice.

Saksara has made this a little easier by identifying the institutions in Australia that have been identified as being at or above world standard in each off the disciplines of research.