Analysing the performance of New Zealand universities in the 2010 Academic Ranking of World Universities

Ranking of New Zealand universities

The ARWU does not publish the individual rankings of universities that are outside of the top 500. The rankings for these universities are reported in blocks with the universities ranked in alphabetical order. As all of the New Zealand universities are ranked outside of the top 100, the methodology used to determine the rankings in the ARWU has been applied by the Ministry of Education to the published raw data to generate the derived rankings for the New Zealand universities.⁵ This methodology applies a weighting to each of the six component measures to arrive at an overall weighted score. This weighted score is then rebased, with the top-performing university being assigned a score of 100.

The published results for the 2010 ARWU show that the University of Auckland and the University of Otago were ranked between 201 to 300 in the top 500 universities, while Massey University, the University of Canterbury and Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) were ranked between 401 and 500.⁶

The individual rankings of the New Zealand universities derived by the Ministry of Education from the underlying data published in the 2010 ARWU are presented in Table 1 and show that The University of Auckland (210) is the highest ranked New Zealand university, followed by the University of Otago (295). The lowest of the New Zealand universities within the top 500 is Victoria VUW, with a ranking of 471.

The University of Canterbury had the largest fall in ranking from 2009 to 2010, dropping by 38 places to 460. In total, three of the five New Zealand universities in the top 500 had a drop in ranking. The average fall in ranking for the New Zealand universities was 13 places. This compared with a rise of eight places in the average ranking of the Australian G8 universities.

Over the period between 2006 and 2010, the average drop in places by New Zealand universities was 18, with the largest individual drop exhibited by Massey University (55 places).⁷ The University of Auckland is the only New Zealand university with a higher ranking in 2010 compared with 2006. During this period, the average ranking of the G8 universities improved by 13 places.

Note: 1. The ARWU does not publish the individual rankings of universities that are outside of the top 100. The rankings for these universities are reported in blocks with the universities ranked in alphabetical order. As all of the New Zealand universities are ranked outside of the top 100, the methodology used to determine the rankings in the ARWU has been applied by the Ministry of Education to the published raw data to generate the derived rankings for the New Zealand universities. The raw data is available at www.arwu.org. 2. This table has been revised.

Figure 1: Overall ranking of New Zealand universities