Our universities 'could do better' in world ranking
Wednesday August 13 2008
AN Irish university has moved up an international rankings table of the top 500 colleges -- but Ireland still lags well behind the world's best.
University College Cork (UCC) has jumped from the lowest rung and joined University College Dublin (UCD) in a band spanning 303rd-401st place.
Trinity College Dublin (TCD) has held its place as the top Irish university, in a group ranked between 201st and 302nd place, and is Ireland's sole standard-bearer in Europe's top 100.
No Irish university has managed to crack the international top 200 in the Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) published this week.
Nor does any Irish university feature in tables of the top 100 by discipline -- social sciences, natural sciences and maths, engineering/technology/computer science, life and agricultural science, clinical medicine and pharmacy..
The annual rankings is based on several indicators of academic performance, including the total number of alumni and staff winning Nobel prizes, the number of highly cited researchers and articles published in the 'Science' and 'Nature' academic magazines. The list is dominated by American colleges and headed by Harvard. The top European college is the UK's Oxford, followed by Cambridge. Queens University Belfast is in the same band as TCD.
- Katherine Donnelly
