Shanghai Rankings 2018: Same old top 10, Australia improves

17 Aug 2018

The 2018 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) – known as the Shanghai Rankings – was published yesterday, and Harvard continues to be the global number one for the 16th consecutive year.

Other institutions in the Top 10 remain unchanged. Similarly, those in positions 11-20 last year either moved up or down the ranks by two positions maximum.

Here’s a list of the Top 20 institutions this year:

Rank 2018	Rank 2017	Institution	Country
1	1	Harvard University	United States
2	2	Stanford University	United States
3	3	University of Cambridge	United Kingdom
4	4	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)	United States
5	5	University of California, Berkeley	United States
6	6	Princeton University	United States
7	7	University of Oxford	United Kingdom
8	8	Columbia University	United States
9	9	California Institute of Technology	United States
10	10	University of Chicago	United States
11	12	University of California, Los Angeles	United States
12	14	Cornell University	United States
12	11	Yale University	United States
14	13	University of Washington	United States
15	15	University of California, San Diego	United States
16	17	University of Pennsylvania	United States
17	16	University College London	United Kingdom
18	18	Johns Hopkins University	United States
19	19	Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich	Switzerland
20	20	Washington University in St. Louis	United States

More changes emerge further down the ranks.

Improvements are plenty among Australian institutions: the University of Melbourne is one notch up from last year’s position, leading the country at 38th spot.

The Australian National University is now at 69th position, up significantly from 97th last year. Meanwhile, the Univesity of Sydney sees its position move from 15 spots to 68th this year.

The Australian Financial Review (AFR) notes that the number of Australian universities in the Shanghai Rankings top 100 has doubled from just three back in 2003, when the rankings were first published.

The country’s advance in the rankings this year comes in the wake of a report that Australia has surpassed the UK as the second favourite study abroad destination, despite the latter having held the position comfortably for many years.

Earlier this week, another report by London Economics, found that the Group of Eight universities contributed AU$66.4 billion to the country’s economy in short and long-term benefits in 2016.

Hats off 🎓🎓 to the 6 #Aussie #universities who’ve ranked in the #top100 in the world’s best university rankings. 🇦🇺👏 Shout out to @unimelb making the #top50 (placing 38th), and @Sydney_Uni who has jumped 15 places to 68th. See the full rankings: https://t.co/QnNJeBd7Wz pic.twitter.com/BerTTIZU77

— Australia in the US (@AusintheUS) August 15, 2018

Speaking to AFR, Higher Education Program Director at the Grattan Institute, Andrew Norton, said it was a strong performance from Australia in what’s widely regarded as one of the best global rankings.

“Shanghai has a single focus on research rather than combining multiple surveys. It shows that research in Australia has been pretty strong, has transformed itself over 25-year period,” he said.

“Research is very globalised and we are well integrated into global research.”

The London Economics report showed that the Go8 universities alone secured a total of AU$2.44 billion in research-related income in 2016, for which almost half (45 percent) was received through Australian competitive grants, the majority of which ($0.99bn) was provided by Commonwealth departments and agencies.

At the same time, university-financed research has also increased when compared to figures from more than a decade ago.

To understand how Australia’s strong performance is linked to heightened university research activities, we need to consider the Shanghai Ranking’s methodology. Heavy emphasis is placed on the number of Nobel Prizes, Fields Medals and publications in the scientific journals Nature and Science:

Criteria	Indicator	Code	Weight
Quality of Education	Alumni of an institution winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals	Alumni	10%
Quality of Faculty	Staff of an institution winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals	Award	20%
Quality of Faculty	Highly cited researchers in 21 broad subject categories	HiCi	20%
Research Output	Papers published in Nature and Science (N&S)*	N&S	20%
Research Output	Papers indexed in Science Citation Index-expanded and Social Science Citation Index	PUB	20%
Per Capita Performance	Per capita academic performance of an institution	PCP	10%
Total			100%
* For institutions specialized in humanities and social sciences such as London School of Economics, N&S is not considered, and the weight of N&S is relocated to other indicators.

While these indicators are often praised as objective and stable, one downside to the focus on research is that the rankings do not account for university size. A bigger university will always end up with more publications and award winners, regardless of research (or teaching) quality.