Earlier this month the 2025 QS World University Rankings by Subject were released. This is a university ranking system that evaluates over 5,000 universities and then ranks more than 1,700 of them across specific subject areas. The 2025 rankings are happy news for Australian universities: despite the narrowing of the international education revenue stream that has beset them over the preceding five years, they made their regular — expected, certainly, but still gratifying — good showing.
The QS methodology is weighted heavily towards research prestige and reputation. The metrics by which subject areas are assessed include academic reputation, employer reputation, citations per paper, H-index and, where applicable, international research network. Vocational degree outcomes are indirectly represented only by one metric of the five, employer reputation.
When it comes to measures of research, Australian universities consistently rank highly in OECD per capita outputs, even when compared with other strongly performing systems across Europe and North America. This quality is reflected in this year’s QS rankings, too, in which Australia was 4th globally in the number of subjects listed. Popular industry commentator Future Campus has posted a useful article that contextualises Australia within the international landscape: 67.1% of Australian universities listed subjects that are ranked in the world’s top 200, compared with 63.9% in the USA and 69.1% in the UK.
As always, the Group of Eight universities were well-represented among the highest-ranked Australian institutions. These large research-focused universities attract the lion’s share of competitive grant funding in Australia and consequently it is never a surprise to see them perform admirably in international rankings that consider research prestige and academic reputation. This year, the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne made a particularly good showing; the University of Sydney ranked first in Australia across nine separate disciplines and the University of Melbourne ranked in the top 50 in all broad subject areas.
At a time when much of the sector is occupied with conversations regarding reduced resources, it is good to remind ourselves of Australia’s research successes. As a nation, we do now, and will undoubtedly continue to, contribute significantly to the global stock of new knowledge.
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