Where do our universities sit in the World?

The Times World University rankings have just been released. While it’s easy to debate the utility of ranking educational institutions, its impossible not to take a look at where our universities sit compared to the rest of the World.

Here are the Australian universities in the top 100:

33 University of Melbourne
52 ANU
56 University of Sydney
60 University of Queensland
73 Monash
82 UNSW

One interesting insight that you get from looking at the various statistics in the Times list is that the top ten universities in the World are dominated by men. 67% of CalTech students are men, 54% of those attending Oxford are men, and so on. Our Australian universities tend to lean the other way with more female students than male. That’s not at all to say that the female-to-male ratio is why the top universities sit at the top; rather it’s indicative of the continuing battle women face to get accepted – and perhaps it says something good about Australia.