The University of Limerick has dropped out of the world’s top 500 universities.
The 2016 World University Rankings, published last week, ranks UL in the 501-550 band, a significant fall from its previous position of 471.
The Irish Universities Association (IUA) has responded to this news by referring to a decade of austerity and its “corrosive effect” on our higher education system.
Stating that the “continued slide” of the Irish Universities should be “greeted with alarm” the IUA said that positive strides in research and the internationalisation of the staff and student cohort was being “undermined by the negative impact of underfunding on key indicators such as the student:faculty ratio.”
IUA Chief Executive, Ned Costello said: “We can no longer hide from the corrosive effect which years of cutbacks are having on our higher education system. At a time when we are more dependent than ever on the talent of our people for our economic future, we simply must invest in our universities.”
“An immediate injection of funding is required in the upcoming Budget and Estimates to fund more lecturers, deliver smaller group teaching and restore quality in our system,” Mr Costello concluded.
Between 2007 and 2014, state funding for universities in this country fell by 28%, from €722.8m in 2007 to €522.2m in 2014.
Conversely there was an increase in full-time enrollment in Irish universities of 18%, from 78,577 in 2008 to 93,023 in 2014.
Reacting to these figures, the General Secretary of the Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT), Mike Jennings, said, “It is shocking to realise that student to academic staff ratios were worse in 2011 than those described in the report of the Commission on Higher Education (1967) and increased from 19:1 in 2007 to 23:1 in 2011.”
Mr Jennings echoed the need to address this issue in this year’s budget, “The forthcoming Budget must address this crisis as a priority. The government must provide adequate funds to enable universities to recover from a decade of what now seems like deliberate neglect and downgrading of third-level education,” he said.
All but one of Ireland’s universities have dropped in the listings, with only National University of Ireland in Galway improving upon last year’s position by rising from 271st to 249th.
Trinity College Dublin remains Ireland’s highest ranked university in 98th place. For the fifth year running the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been rated as the world’s best university.
Out of the 32 OECD countries featured in the rankings, Ireland’s expenditure on third-level institutions was the fourth lowest.
