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Dublin: 10 °C Thursday 20 June, 2013

No major changes for Irish colleges in latest University rankings

Trinity College, UCD, UCC, NUI Galway and DCU haven’t seen any major change in their rankings since this time last year.

Students mark Freshers Week at Trinity College last year: TCD remains Ireland's top-ranked university; Ireland still has three institutions in the top 200.
Students mark Freshers Week at Trinity College last year: TCD remains Ireland's top-ranked university; Ireland still has three institutions in the top 200.
Image: Sasko Lazarov/Photocall Ireland

THE WORLD RANKINGS of Ireland’s top universities have remained largely unchanged in the latest rankings from education company QS.

Trinity College remains Ireland’s top-ranked university, ahead of University College Dublin, while University College Cork cements its spot among the world’s top 200 universities.

Trinity is ranked at 67 – down two spots from the 2011 rankings – while UCD is up three spaces to 131. University College Cork, which made the top 200 for the first time in 2010, is down by 9 spaces but remains at 190.

NUI Galway is up 11 spots to 287, while Dublin City University is up two notches to 324. The University of Limerick is unchanged from last year, given a ranking between 451 and 500, while NUI Maynooth kept its slot in the 501-550 category.

Queen’s University Belfast had the best improvement of the island’s nine universities, jumping 27 places to 166. The University of Ulster is not graded.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology is declared the world’s best university, with an overall score of 100, just 0.2 points ahead of the University of Cambridge which is in second place. Harvard University is in third, on 99.2, while University College London is at 98.7.

Trinity College’s score, by comparison, is 71.3, while UCD totalled 59.1 and UCC managed 50.2.

The colleges’ overall scores are based on their relative rankings in five academic disciplines: Social Sciences & Management, Natural Sciences, Life Sciences & Medicines, Engineering & Technology, and Arts & Humanities.

Separate rankings from QS – listing cities in terms of their quality of living, affordability, employment activity and student mix – puts Dublin as the ninth-best city in which to study – ahead of the likes of Barcelona, Munich and New York.

Paris is considered the top city in which to study, leading London, Boston, Melbourne, Vienna, Sydney, Zurich and Berlin.

Read: Almost all parents want children to go to college but many can’t pay for it

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Comments (13 Comments)

  • University College Cork drops down the listings while it’s president complains that his salary of nearly a quarter of a million (the highest in Ireland) is not enough for him to live comfortably on.

    Reply
  • Why do photographers insist on getting people to throw things in the air for photo ops? Jumping is another thing that annoys me. Read any paper and it’s all jumping, throwing or Andrea Roche “models” holding something.

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  • Trinity used to be in the Top 50 back about 5-6 years ago. Wonder did the decline coincide with the recession? Top 100 is a fine achievement.

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    • The difficulty with the university rankings is that since 2009 (I think) there’s been two sets of them. Previously QS did the rankings on behalf of Times Higher Education (THE) – there was only one ranking, the THE-QS ranking – but since they split a few years ago there’s been two, which use slightly different methodologies.

      If I remember correctly the year Trinity made the Top 50 was the same year that UCD made the top 100; if it was, it was definitely the last year of the THE-QS rankings. Because the two use different ways of scoring colleges it’s difficult to pick one ‘real’ ranking over the other.

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    • So then what you are saying is that the research methodologies have a big influence on the outcomes! Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who is guarding the guards?) In other words who decides which methodology is valid and what influences do the biases have on outcomes!

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  • Paris is the most affordable city to study in… Never would have guessed

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    • @ Andrew, paris is probably not the least expensive city to live in but there are a myriad of Universities costing ~ 250€/ year for admission fees for one of my kids studying at a mediocre Parisian University. Accommodation is expensive and the trend is towards flat sharing : I think that the overall Paris ” experience” ( culture/ history/ sights etc) pushed Paris in front on global appreciation without real merit. The more ambitious/ more bourgeois French prefer to pay for a ” prepa” for the student for a year or two before entrance exams for the utterly elitist Ecoles/ Polytechnique for the future Captains of Industry. God be with the days when Margaret Thatcher paid my admission fees to QUB with an additional grant thrown in!

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  • Your man in the middle looks very well dressed for his first day

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  • Where’s UL on this list or is it not on them?

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  • How much do we pay the top people in these universities?

    Reply

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