But in the middle and lower ranks some Australian universities made significant advances including the University of Newcastle, Queensland University of Technology, Deakin University, Macquarie University, the University of South Australia, Victoria University, the University of Canberra and Central Queensland University.
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The Times Higher Education rankings for 2016-17, released Wednesday, put uOttawa in a band between 251 and 300 among 980 universities that were rated around the world.
With 88 universities in the top 800, up from 78 a year ago, the United Kingdom is second only to the U.S. for the number institutions in the world’s best 800. Last year, uOttawa fell out of the top 200, ranked between No. 225 and 250, and the decline has continued this year.
“As a university, we are committed to putting the necessary measures in place to improve our overall world ranking”.
The THE World University Rankings are the only global university league tables to judge research-intensive universities across all of their core missions – teaching, research, knowledge transfer and worldwide outlook.
The data error – which sources insist was an innocent mistake – is likely to have adversely affected its ranking position both this year and last.
Victoria University vice-chancellor Professor Peter Dawkins said the university’s result had exceeded expectations. The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) dropped to second place. It attempts to take into account teaching quality by measuring factors such as the number of doctorate students to bachelor students.
Cambridge and Imperial College London joined Oxford in the top 10 for 2016/2017, ranking fourth and eight respectively.
Bahram Bekhradnia, who sits on the board of the Higher Education Authority here and is also president of the UK’s Higher Education Policy Institute, said that all rankings are only as good as the data that feeds them.
Trinity is traditionally ranked as Ireland’s leading university, but speculation in recent days suggested that a catastrophic fall was putting it outside the top 200, and below UCD. As well as some top academics reporting they have been frozen out of collaborative research projects with European Union colleagues, many are admitting that they might look to relocate to a university outside the country.
The warning was echoed by federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham. “We have chose to take Trinity out of the rankings, while we conduct a review of their data and, should it be necessary, recalculate their position for the past two years”, he said.
UNSW’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research, Nicholas Fisk said universities were just as likely to be competing with institutions down the road as they were with ones thousands of kilometres north.
The body also compiles tables which rank universities according to academic disciplines.
“If [the city] can manage to both retain very important, strategic links to outstanding universities in the West, while taking advantage of the levels of funding through partnerships with mainland China, it’s a win-win scenario”, he said.
A spokesman for Cardiff said: “We welcome the fact we’ve maintained our position in this year’s THE World University Rankings – our highest ranking since 2009”.
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A $3.2 billion “zombie” university funding cut has remained in the Turnbull government’s budget with little hope of passing the Senate after twice being rejected.
