Trinity College Dublin, Ireland’s top-ranked university, has slipped 15 places to 161st in the latest set of world university rankings.
Overall the THE (Times Higher Education) World University Rankings 2023 show mixed results for Irish universities.
RCSI and UCD held their position in the top 201-250 category, while University of Galway climbed into the top 301-350.
UCC, by contrast, slipped down into the 301-350 category, while DCU and Maynooth rose into the 401-500.
UL remains in the same category as last year (601-800) as does TU Dublin (1,001-1,200).
In the North, Queen’s University Belfast was ranked 198th.
Critics say university rankings are not an accurate measure of performance and neglect key areas such as the quality of teaching and learning.
However, they remain influential internationally in areas such as reputation, research and student choice.
Trinity’s provost Linda Doyle said that despite scoring strongly in several categories, the university’s overall ranking had suffered due to its high student-staff ratios.
“More importantly than the rankings, it also hurts the education experience of our students,” she said. “The poor staff-student ratio is directly related to the underfunding of the higher education sector in Ireland. It is vital that Government honours the commitment made earlier this year in ‘Funding the Future’ and increase annual core funding by €307 million for the higher education sector in Ireland.
“This would allow us to hire more staff and tackle the issue of staff-student ratios. Until this is addressed, these rankings will remain precarious for us.”
While Minister for Further and Higher Education Simon Harris announced additional core funding of €40 million for the sector in the budget, the Irish Universities Association said this was “very disappointing” and represented just 13 per cent of a €307 million funding gap identified by the Government.
THE rankings include almost 1,800 universities across more than 100 countries and are based on performance indicators such as teaching, research, citations, international outlook and industry income.
The UK performed particularly strongly in this year’s rankings with the University of Oxford retaining the top spot for the seventh consecutive year.
Irish academic Louise Richardson, vice chancellor of the University of Oxford, said the college was indebted to its academics whose research and teaching “continues to excite our imaginations, broaden our horizons, cure disease and explore deeply difficult problems for the betterment of society”.
It was joined in the top-10 by University of Cambridge (joint third, up from joint fifth last year) and Imperial College London (10th, up from 12th), led by former UCD president Prof Hugh Brady.
The UK performance comes despite concern over Brexit and its detachment from the research powerhouses of continental Europe.
While the US has the most universities represented in the top 100, the number has fallen from a peak of 43 in 2018 to 34 this year.
There are mixed results for Europe with top-ranked universities in France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland and Norway all losing ground.
ETH Zurich was the top-ranking European university (11th place), followed by Technical University of Munich (30th), LMU Munich (33rd) and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland (41st).
Asia as a whole performed strongly and China has 11 universities in the top 200 for the first time.
Phil Baty, chief knowledge officer at Times Higher Education, said that while Europe remains a thriving centre of higher education and research, a significant shift in the balance of power in the knowledge economy has taken place with Asian universities outnumbering those from Europe in the overall rankings.
“While Europe continues to have a much higher average performance overall compared to Asia, at the very top of the rankings, Asia’s leaders are dominating those of continental Europe,” he said.
“Despite an extraordinarily rich and diverse heritage of excellence across Europe, there is no room at all for complacency. You have to run very fast to stand still in the global rankings and losing ground can risk a vicious circle of gradually losing access to global talent and partnerships.”
When broken down by country, the US has the most universities in the top 200 in the world (58), followed by the UK (28) and Germany (22).
