EIGHT IRISH UNIVERSITIES have made it into the top 1,000 of the Center for World University Rankings 2014, with one Irish institution making the top 200…just.

Trinity College Dublin came in placed 200th, beating University College Dublin which was 269 on the list.

The top five went along the the usual lines with Harvard topping the list ahead of Stanford, MIT, Cambridge and Oxford.

As if to underline its dominance, Harvard was judged to be the best performer in seven of the eight indicators measured by CWUR.

cwur.org The top five Universities in this year's list. cwur.org

The methodology of these indicators though perhaps demonstrate why the ranking system doesn’t mean on that much to Irish students in reality.

‘Alumni Employment’ for example measures the number of a university’s alumni who “currently hold CEO positions at the world’s top companies relative to the university’s size”. Leading a Fortune 500 company is hardly the be all and end all for Irish students.

The other indicators also focus heavily on research in “highly-influential journals” and academics who have won “major international awards, prizes, and medals”.

Irish universities in the CWUR ranking

cwur.org cwur.org

Queen’s University Belfast was ranked 342 on the list and was 31st out of 64 UK universities that made the top 1,000.

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