Give me a crash course in: university rankings

Is it true Irish universities got downgraded by ratings agencies this week?

Sort of. The latest set of influential world university rankings – compiled by Times Higher Education – shows that no Irish university made the prestigious top-200 list for the first time. Trinity College Dublin, which ranked 160th last year, was omitted at short notice due to an error which saw it tumble down the rankings. UCD, meanwhile, slipped from 176th place into the 201-250 band. It sits alongside the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) and National University of Ireland (NUI) Galway, both of which gained ground from their rankings in the 250-300 band last year.

So, Trinity can’t do its maths. Right?

Both Trinity and Times Higher Education say there was an honest mistake made in data sent by the college. It is understood it related to the state of Trinity finances and may have been a misplaced decimal point. This is likely to have adversely affected its ranking position both this year and last, according to the rankings agency. It will feature in a revised set of rankings over the coming months.

If we’re tumbling down the league tables and can’t do our maths, maybe we’re just not as smart as we used to be?

The rankings agencies use a series of metrics to assess the performance of individual colleges. These relate to how much money they have to spend per student, research capacity, citations and universities’ reputations. They do not, however, measure academic performance or tuition quality. Irish universities argue that the main factor behind the decline in our top performers is down to the fact that State funding has been shrinking over the past eight years or so. This, in turn, is leading to higher student-to-staff ratios and limiting their research capacity.

But do any students really care about their university’s ranking?

Rankings may not occupy the minds of most students or lecturers. But they are crucial in attracting research funding, international students and foreign direct investment. Also, some of the issues which affect rankings – such as student-to-staff ratios – can be crucial to the quality of tuition.

If we’re dunces, who’s top of the class?

The University of Oxford is the world’s top university, according to the latest rankings, followed by the California Institute of Technology and Stanford University. In Europe, most countries have been losing ground while Asian countries, such as China, Hong Kong and South Korea, are climbing up the rankings.

If many other European countries are losing ground, maybe we’re making too much fuss about this?

Maybe – but pressure on the system is set to grow. High birth rates mean the number of students entering higher education will grow by more than 20 per cent over the next decade or so. An expert group on the future funding of higher education was established two years ago to draw up a series of reform options including a student loan scheme. Its report, published earlier this year, put it bluntly. “The funding system is simply not fit for purpose,” the group’s chairman, Peter Cassells, wrote. “It fails to recognise the scale of the coming demographic changes. These pressures are now seriously threatening quality.”

So how do we stem the decline?

Universities want a long-term funding model to guarantee them finding. But any move towards a student loan scheme is a political hot potato. That may be one reason why Minister for Education Richard Bruton wants the issue to be debated by an Oireachtas committee.