Irish colleges among top 10% in ranking

An EU-led ranking system shows strong performances by some Irish colleges in a project that aims to give students more comprehensive information than university league tables.

The U-Multirank project allows students, parents, and policymakers to compare almost 900 third-level institutions under 30 indicators.

For each of these indicators, colleges were awarded one of five grades: A (very good), B (good), C (average), D (below average), and E (weak).

Although data for 11 Irish colleges is included, among them six universities but not NUI Maynooth, there was incomplete data for many of them and most measures were self-reported to U-Multirank.

Dublin City University has A’s on 15 out of 30 indicators, followed by UCC with 14, NUI Galway with 12, and Cork Institute of Technology with 11, placing all in the best 10% of the 879 institutions included.

DCU and UCC both scored A’s on external research income, on private income, patent awards, under two main international sub-headings, and UCC got A’s on three sub-categories for regional engagement.

Jim Browne, president of NUI Galway, said the institution’s strong performance on securing regional employment for humanities graduates and internships for current students confirmed its role as a vital economic driver of employment, learning, and research.

Trinity College Dublin, which fares best of Irish universities in most global rankings, had seven A’s, and University College Dublin got six.

However, full data from both, like many other colleges, was not included in the comparisons.

Rather than producing league tables like those most commonly seen, which rank or band colleges numerically, the U-Multirank team said such exercises are not methodically sound. “I don’t think there’s much value in us comparing Harvard with an art academy in Paris,” said Jon File from the Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies in the Netherlands which led the project. The main headings under which colleges were compared were: Teaching and learning; research; knowledge transfer; international orientation; and regional engagement. Almost two-thirds of the colleges whose data was examined are European. By selecting a range of criteria that particularly interest them, users of the website can find colleges that may interest them in a particular country or region, or depending on different disciplines or fields of study.

www.umultirank.org