UCD has gone down 22 places in the QS World University Rankings 2016/17.
All Irish universities went down in the rankings apart from NUI Galway which rose to 249th place. UCD, the second highest ranking university in Ireland, fell to 176th place in the global rankings. Trinity College Dublin fell 20 places to barely make it into the top 100 universities at 98th position.
However Trinity did rise in the citations per faculty measurement to 151st place, while UCD is ranked 185th.
Regarding other Irish University rankings, University College Cork fell out of the top 250 to 283rd, Dublin City University fell to 380 and University of Limerick fell from the top 500. DIT and NUI Maynooth are now ranked in the 651-700 bracket.
The decline in rankings has been linked to the cut in funding for Irish third level institutions since the start of the recession.
Ben Sowter, head of research at QS said: “While recognising Ireland’s difficulties in recovering from the economic shocks of the previous decade, the effect of seven years of higher education cuts are laid bare by this year’s rankings.”
This was a sentiment echoed in joint statement released today by UCD President Andrew Deeks and Trinity College Provost Patrick Prendergast. They claimed “rankings have their limitations but the fact that our universities have fallen so far in recent years reflects the reality that successive governments have not invested sufficiently in Irish education.” The statement went on to urge the current government and opposition parties to act on the Cassells’ report, which was released earlier this year.
There are some factors that the rankings do not take into account such as outreach programmes for students in disadvantage communities, student supports, community engagement, and quality of the workplace for academics. The rankings also limit engagement with industry to the top 500 companies in the world and so excludes SMEs and start-ups.
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