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

Ranking of New Zealand universities based on the Academic Ranking of World Universities ‘per capita’ measure

The ARWU rankings include a component measure that attempts to represent the performance of universities on a per academic staff member basis.⁸ This is the ‘per capita’ measure which is generated by taking the weighted scores of the other five component measures and dividing by the number of full-time equivalent academic staff. Note that in cases where there is no data available on the number of academic staff, the original weighted score of the five other ARWU components has been used. So the results discussed in this section should be viewed with this caveat in mind.

The results in Table 2 show that in this component measure, the University of Otago is the top-ranked New Zealand university in 2010 in 98^th place, followed by the University of Auckland in 238^th place. Between 2009 and 2010, three of the five New Zealand universities improved their ranking in this component measure, compared with just two New Zealand university in the overall rankings presented in Table 1. Notably, since 2007, the University of Otago has improved 63 places and it is now ranked within the top 100. In addition, the performance of the University of Otago in 2010 is above the G8 university average.

Note:

1. To generate the rankings, the universities in the ARWU top 500 have been ranked from highest to lowest based on their ‘per capita’ score. The ‘per capita’ score for each university can be found at www.arwu.org.
2. This table has been revised.

Figure 2: Ranking of New Zealand universities based on the Academic Ranking of World Universities ‘per capita’ measure

The average ranking of the New Zealand universities in both overall and ‘per capita’ rankings is compared to the average performance of the G8 universities in Figure 3. The G8 universities have increased their average ranking in both the overall and ‘per capita’ rankings, with their biggest improvement coming in the latter measure. However, the smaller New Zealand universities have experienced a decrease in their average overall ranking, especially since 2008, while their ‘per capita’ ranking has increased over the same period. Clearly, once the size of an institution is taken into account, the performance of New Zealand universities has been much better than the indication given by the overall rankings.

Figure 3: Average ranking of New Zealand and G8 universities