No 1 in Aust., world No 22
[ UniNews Vol. 13, No. 23
13 - 27 December 2004 ]
The University of Melbourne has been listed as No 1 in a ranking of Australias universities by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research in its study, The International Standing of Australian Universities.
This follows the worldwide ranking of the University at No 22 by the Times Higher Education Supplement.
Vice-Chancellor Professor Kwong Lee Dow says that because Melbourne is a well-established research-intensive university, and the work of its researchers is well known and respected internationally, it regularly features strongly in international rankings of universities.
Under those circumstances it is perhaps not so surprising that it has ranked equal first with the Australian National University, he said. But what makes this study particularly interesting and credible is the Melbourne Institutes clearly-defined methodology.
The Melbourne Institute study by Professor Ross Williams and Dr Nina Van Dyke took two approaches to ranking. CEOs of some of the worlds best universities and deans of Australian universities were surveyed for their perceptions of the international standing of Australian universities to produce a reputation index. These qualitative results were combined with quantitative data on current performance to produce an index of international standing.
The rankings looked at six attributes of international standing quality/international standing of staff, quality of graduate programs, quality of undergraduate entry, quality of undergraduate programs, resource levels and the survey of educationists.
All survey respondents were asked what weights they would put on these categories and those weights were used to combine the ratings for each category into a single rating.
The end result for the top eight institutions was Melbourne and ANU sharing top honours followed by Sydney, Queensland and New South Wales, with Monash and Western Australia sharing sixth place and Adelaide in eighth place.
For the full report on the rankings go to http://www.melbourneinstitute.com/austuniv/austuniv.html
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