Following Temporary Exclusion Last Year, Trinity Ranked 131st in World by Times Higher Education.
Trinity has been re-included in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings after it’s exclusion in September of last year, for submitting incorrect data.
The university sent data relating to its research funding to the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings in the wrong format two years in a row.
As a result of the formatting error, the research budget that the university submitted was underestimated by a decimal point; for example, a research budget of €10 million would show up as €1 million in the Higher Education rankings.
Dean of Research Professor John Boland admitted that it was a foolish mistake to make and because of this erroneous error it had led to the universities world rankings decline over the past two years in a row.
“We realised something was wrong last year and they came back to us and said we were doing it wrong for two years,” he said.
However, since the correction to the format of the budget which was previously submitted, Trinity have retrospectively revised their position in the world rankings from 131st to 101st for the academic year 2015/2016 and from unranked to 130th for the current academic year.
Prof Boland said that while the revised rankings sound like great news for the college, they also demonstrate that Trinity has dropped 30 places in a single year even when the figures were revised.
“This amounts to a 30 per cent drop in rank and crystallises the international headwinds facing the Irish university sector following a decade of neglect and chronic underfunding,” he said.
Prof. Boland also called on the Irish government to invest more capital in universities if they want to continue to produce highly skilled workforce needed in a post Brexit world.
He said,” if the Government expects excellence from the universities and the capacity to create the sort of skilled workforce needed in a post-Brexit world, it must begin to invest in education once again.”
Paul Dwyer
Image Credit: Rachel Farrell