Инженерный вестник: Rankings leap boosts Melbourne

AUSTRALIA improved its performance in the Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings despite a stronger showing by Chinese and Saudi universities, analysis shows.

The University of Melbourne, which leapt from 75 to 62 on the back of alumna Elizabeth Blackburn's 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, recorded the biggest increase of any university in the top 100.

Melbourne was "now only fractionally behind" the Australian National University, which retained its 59th rank and Australian pre-eminence, Melbourne's higher education professor Simon Marginson told the HES.

Melbourne's performance was boosted by alumni prizes, a stronger citation performance for its academic papers, and articles in Science and Nature, he said.

Melbourne's vice-chancellor Glyn Davis said it was an "excellent result" that testified to the university's continued rise in the rankings during the past eight years.

"Since these measures are entirely based on research, this is a wonderful vindication of our research leadership and performance in recent years," Professor Davis said.

The University of Sydney has improved its position by rising from 94th place to 92nd.

"The larger news in the 2010 ranking is about China. The Confucian model is rising," Professor Marginson said (see below). Two mainland Chinese universities -- Peking and Tsinghua -- have broken through to the top 200, and China now has 22 universities in the top 500, up from just eight in 2005.

Saudi Arabia has two universities in the top 500, up from one last year.
However, "Australia has not lost ground and has slightly improved its performance overall," Professor Marginson said.

The same 17 Australian universities again appear in the SJT top 500, with Monash breaking through to the top 200 and James Cook into the top 400.
The universities of Queensland and Western Australia, Monash and the University of NSW are the leading Australians outside the top 100.
Macquarie again turned in the top performance from a non-Group of Eight research university, retaining its place in the top 300 alongside Adelaide.

But the University of Tasmania dropped a band into the top 500.
Flinders, Newcastle and Wollongong universities retained their ranking in the top 400.
Curtin, La Trobe and Swinburne universities also retained their ranking a band lower in the top 500.

Swinburne vice-chancellor Ian Young said he was delighted with the university's performance, calculating it had jumped 40 places.
Swinburne was the smallest Australian university to be included in the rankings, he said.
On the research field front, Australia also improved its performance over last year, Professor Marginson said.

Life sciences is clearly Australia's strongest research field, with three universities -- Western Australia, the ANU and Melbourne -- in the world top 50. UWA's life science school is ranked 34th, the highest rated academic school in Australia.

In medicine, where the US held the top eight ranks, Melbourne, UQ and UWA are in the top 75.

In engineering, US universities hold the top 15 ranks, while Melbourne, UNSW and Sydney are in the top 75.

Overall, the US retained its stranglehold on the rankings, with Harvard at the top for the eighth year running.

The University of California, Berkeley, won second place by edging Stanford into third place.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology edged out Cambridge to take fourth place, leaving the British university in fifth place.

Cambridge, Oxford in 10th place and the University of Tokyo are the only non-US universities in the SJT top 20.

In the Asia-Pacific region, the ANU was pipped by the universities of Tokyo, in 20th place, and Kyoto at 24. However, Japan's overall influence is fading, with the number of universities in the top 500 dropping since last year from 31 to 25. The number of British universities in the rankings dropped from 40 to 38, and the US went from 154 to 152.

New Zealand also performed well with Auckland and Otago retaining their positions in the top 300, while Massey, Canterbury and Wellington also retained their top 500 ranks.

As the role of universities in the innovation economy grows, the SJT rankings are increasingly seen as an important measure of a nation's economic health and competitiveness.

Source: The Australian
Photo: Toad Hall of the Australian National University in Canberra (photo from the Australian National University website )

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