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Students at freshers' week in Trinity College. TCD remains Ireland's top university, followed by UCD, UCC and NUI Galway.
QS university rankings
TCD, UCD and UCC are all down in the latest world rankings
Only one Irish university made the top 100, but four have risen up the rankings.
IRISH UNIVERSITIES HAVE continued to lose ground in the latest university rankings released today.
The respected QS rankings show Trinity College Dublin is still Ireland’s highest-ranked university, though it slipped from joint 71st to 78th place.
University College Dublin is ranked 154th – down 15 spots from last year’s table – while University College Cork dropped three places to joint 233rd.
The trajectory was up for other universities, with NUI Galway climbing nine spots to 271st and Dublin City University going up 13 places to 353rd.
NUI Maynooth jumped a band from 601-650 to 551-600, while the University of Limerick rose from the 501-550 bracket to 471-480.
‘Remarkably competitive’
Commenting on the findings, QS, a British education company, said: “Considering the strong representation of Irish universities per capita, one ranked university per 130,000 people, Irish universities are akin to the Irish rugby team; remarkably competitive given their population, funding and resources; and consistently so.”
American and British universities continue to dominate the annual list, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology taking this year’s top position, followed by Harvard, Cambridge and Stanford.
The QS rankings, one of the top three international league tables, marks universities on four key pillars: research, teaching, employability and internationalisation.
Institutions are judged on six areas: academic reputation (40%), employer reputation (10%), faculty-student ratio (20%), citations per faculty (20%), international students (5%) and international faculty (5%).
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