More than half of Australia’s universities dropped in global rankings this week.
Individual results always bounce around. But this drop, via the Centre for World University Rankings, suggests the decline of Australia’s standing in many global rankings systems is more than a blip.
Centre for World University Rankings president Nadim Mahassen [warned]:(https://www.smh.com.au/national/undermines-the-country-s-long-term-future-more-than-half-of-australia-s-universities-dive-in-global-rankings-20260527-p60129.html)
Australian universities are struggling to deliver high-quality education, attract and retain talent, and produce quality research at scale.
Mahassen explained this is “not just an academic problem” but one that undermines Australia’s “long-term future”.
The rankings also follow a high-profile opinion piece by academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who wrote last week how she had told her teenage stepdaughter to think twice about going to uni:
right now kids are taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt to have a terrible campus experience while being graded on who can write the best AI prompts.
What’s going on?
What are rankings and what did they show?
Global university rankings aim to evaluate all universities in the world through a single framework. Each ranking system has a slightly different focus and methodology.
The Centre for World University Rankings measured more than 20,000 universities globally on four factors: education, employability of graduates, number of faculty members who have received top academic distinctions, and research output.
Of the 39 Australian universities included in the exercise, 14 improved their rank compared with last year, four stayed the same and 21 dropped.
Four Australian institutions made it into the top 100. While this number is the same as last year, the Australian National University and University of Sydney fell a few places, to numbers 93 and 100 respectively. The University of New South Wales and the University of Melbourne held the top spots for Australian universities at 52 and 64 respectively, with no change from last year.
June is the start of global “rankings season”, so we will soon see whether these trends continue to hold.
Other high-profile global rankings include those by QS Quacquarelli Symonds, Shanghai Ranking and the Times Higher Education.
A drop but not a shock
Last year, we saw some similar downward trends in Australia’s rankings, which university commentators described as a “wake-up call” for the sector.
So this year’s decline will not be a shock to anyone who works at an Australian university. Administrators also know the rankings can move around from year to year.
However, it is harder to brush off this year’s results. As media reports noted, universities have “tumbled” in rankings after a “scandal-plagued year”. It also follows an increased propensity to label the Australian higher education sector as being in “crisis”.
This label is tied to criticisms that unis are being run like profit-focused businesses, instead of places of education and aspiration, research and development, and civic engagement for the good of the community.
Indeed, as the rankings were released, Mahassen also cautioned Australia’s poor result reflected years of inadequate funding and the “devaluation of science and education as public goods”.
Amid criticisms of universities operating like corporate entities it is important to note federal funding to the sector (not including for HECS/HELP) has declined in recent decades, from 0.9% of GDP in 1995 to 0.6% of GDP in 2021.
Constant concerns
Universities have certainly been making headlines for the wrong reasons in recent years.
Concerns about university executives’ behaviour and pay have become regular stories.
On top of this, we have had a year-long Senate inquiry into university governance, which revealed a lack of transparency about spending on services such as consultancies. Labor senator Tony Sheldon criticised universities for
[taking money] out of the pocket of taxpayers and not going into better services for our students.
These issues have been exacerbated by both threatened and actual cuts to operations and jobs at many universities. This comes amid underpayment cases and precarious work conditions for many academics.
As the late professor Graeme Turner argued in his 2025 book, the Australian university system is “broken and urgently needs fixing”.
Read more:
There is declining trust in Australian unis. Federal government policy is a big part of the problem
What are students paying for?
Some Australian undergraduates are taking on huge levels of debt to go to university.
The Job-ready Graduates scheme restructured university fees in 2021 under the Morrison government. It lowered fees in some areas, such as teaching and nursing, while massively increasing the cost of degrees in humanities fields. Despite widespread criticism of the scheme, the Labor government has not scrapped it. Arts degrees now cost more than A$50,000.
These huge costs comes amid moves to reduce in-person lectures and tutorials at some universities.
It also comes as universities – in Australia and around the world – grapple with the rise of AI and what this means for assessments, cheating and the quality of student learning.
No wonder some are questioning whether an expensive uni education is worth it.
The international student factor
But it is not just domestic undergraduate fees and poor executive management that are mixed up in the issues facing our universities.
Rankings are particularly important tools for international student recruitment. Prospective students look closely at the rankings and research and teaching reputations of various unis. A drop in rankings could mean students look to other countries in the competitive global market for the international student dollar.
That dollar is important to Australia. International students have become a crucial funding source for programs and research in our universities. For example, in 2024, Western Sydney University used 24 cents from every dollar an international student pays to subsidise domestic students, research and student services.
Overall, higher education expenditure on research and development reached $16.4 billion in 2024. More than half, around $8.6 billion, came primarily from $13 billion in international education earnings.
As the Group of Eight (which represents the country’s prestigious research universities) notes – inadequate research funding from other sources has led to their reliance on international student fee revenue to cross-subsidise research.
Any loss of income caused by a drop in international student enrolments also impacts Australia’s economy more broadly. International students are now Australia’s largest services export market. The sector was worth $53.6 billion in 2024–25.
What now?
Despite the turmoil around universities, surveys show Australians continue to have higher confidence in universities than in many other institutions, including the federal government.
They have also shown their support for unis facing cuts – such as public opposition to the proposed cuts to the ANU School of Music last year.
This suggests there is some community goodwill towards universities – but we can’t take it for granted. Nor can we take universities themselves for granted.
As Mahassen said, this is not just an academic problem. If our universities are not functioning well, it spills out into the rest of our society, economy and beyond.
