Otago's Stock Does a Fannie Mae

Otago's Stock Does a Fannie Mae

The University of Otago has been declared the 155th best university in the world, tailing 61 places behind the University of Auckland.

The Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings are published annually in the United Kingdom, and according to the official website, feature “over 800 universities worldwide.” The results reflect a total of 62,094 academic and 27,957 employer responses.

QS Head of Research Ben Scowter says that “New Zealand’s universities have collectively seen a drop in academic reputation, faculty-student ratio and international students in this year’s results.”

Otago University fell 23 places from its 2012 position, which was itself three places below its 2011 ranking.

Rankings for individual subject areas are also outlined in QS annual reports, and Otago has seen significant drops since the first QS rankings were released in 2007. In the last six years, Otago’s Natural Science ranking has fallen from 181 to 301, Social Sciences ranking from 92 to 148, and Arts and Humanities ranking from 81 to 161.

Nor has the University of Auckland fared well in the last six years. Impressively, the University scraped into the top 50 in 2007, but has steadily fallen since, only just keeping a place in the top 100 in 2013.

The Tertiary Education Union has blamed government cuts for New Zealand’s tertiary plummet. TEU Vice-President Sandra Grey claimed that New Zealand universities are struggling to keep up with their East Asian counterparts, which enjoy greater financial resources. “That task is made near impossible by a government that has cut hundreds of millions of dollars [from] tertiary education in the last five years,” says Grey.

“We are moving in the wrong direction. New Zealand academics are highly regarded, and are involved in world-class research and teaching. But falling government funding means they face larger lectures and tutorials, more administrative workload that takes time away from research and teaching, and stagnant pay.” According to QS, New Zealand’s student-to-academic ratio rose from 17.5:1 in 2007 to 19:1 in 2012.

Worldwide, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has topped the list for the second year in a row. The top 10 ranked universities are all in either the United Kingdom or the United States, and are composed largely of members of the Ivy League in particular.

On a positive note, Lincoln University, which did not make the 2012 rankings, gained a ranking of 481= in 2013. This makes Lincoln the only New Zealand university to improve its QS ranking. A Lincoln staff member told Critic that this was probably due to the university’s “top notch cow poo analysis.”
This article first appeared in Issue 23, 2013.
Posted 2:39pm Sunday 15th September 2013 by Thomas Raethel.