Top colleges still failing to make grade in global study
Tuesday May 20 2008
IRISH universities have failed to make the premier league of the world's top universities, according to the latest and biggest international study to date.
The best Irish universities could manage was 223rd out of the top 4,000 global list, published by the Webometrics website, which ranks educational institutions across the globe.
Trinity came in at number 223, while UCC came in at 289, way ahead of UCD at 403.
The other Irish institutions that made the cut in the top 1,000 worldwide are DCU (425), University of Limerick (557), NUI Galway (724) and DIT (993).
In all 15,000 universities were analysed for the Webometrics ranking and the top 4,000 have been published recently on the website, webometrics.info.
The site ranks the institutions using indicators such as the number of papers and citations on the net, the number of pages received from search engines such as Google and Yahoo, and the institutions' "visibility" through their total number of external links received.
Promoters of the site say that if the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, university authorities should reconsider their web policy.
Underperforming universities should focus on substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications.
Webometrics is one of a number of international league tables, all of which use different indicators and end up with different results.
For instance, last year Oxford and Cambridge were rated higher in a survey by the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) supplement.
The Provost of Trinity College Dublin, Dr John Hegarty, said he was not unduly surprised nor worried about the latest rankings yesterday.
He said that the THES survey, which placed Trinity 53rd in the world, presented a more balanced picture as it took into account the humanities as well as the sciences. It also considered the views of employers which other studies failed to do.
Research
Dr Hegarty said that it was only in the past decade that Ireland really invested significant amounts of money in research and it would inevitably take some years before that investment was translated into international recognition.
He believed that over the next few years Irish universities would move up the league tables, including the one compiled by Webometrics.
He was speaking after a seminar during which Ben Sowter, the head of research at the education company Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), explained the methods used in compiling the THES rankings. Last year Trinity moved up from 78th to 53rd position in the THES rankings, while UCD rose from 219 two years ago to 177 last year. UCC moved up from 386 to 286; DCU from 441 to 300; DIT from 370 to 351; University of Limerick from 512 to 442 while NUI Galway slipped from 437 to 484 last year.
Mr Sowter said that QS examined 566 leading institutions worldwide in compiling the tables. It was open to any institution to argue for inclusion in consideration for future tables, he added.
The THES rankings show that 57 of the top 200 universities are American, with Harvard ranked the best in the world. Harvard comes third in the Webometrics rankings behind Stanford and MIT.
- John Walshe Education Editor
