Tertiary Education Skills and Employment Minister Steven Joyce has today congratulated all eight of New Zealand’s universities who are ranked in the top 450 universities worldwide, according the annual Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings.
The QS Rankings were released today and show six New Zealand universities have improved in the rankings, while all eight are ranked in world’s top 450.
“New Zealand has a world class tertiary education system and it’s great to see our universities continuing to excel in a highly competitive international environment,” Mr Joyce says.
The QS Rankings considers 3,800 institutions worldwide and ranks the top 916. Auckland University was ranked New Zealand’s highest at 81st, Otago University 169th, Canterbury University 214th equal, Victoria University of Wellington 228th equal, Waikato University 324th, Massey University 340th equal, Lincoln University 343rd equal and Auckland University of Technology 447th.
“Government has shown our commitment to universities by increasing funding for the sector by 24 per cent since 2008. We also announced $761M in new funding for the Innovative New Zealand package of science, tertiary and regional development initiatives in Budget 2016, a lot of which will flow into the university sector.
Innovative New Zealand includes two major initiatives specific to universities as part of Budget 2016. Those initiatives will help our universities remain competitive on the world stage,” Mr Joyce says.
“Entrepreneurial Universities, is a $35 million initiative which will attract more of the world’s leading researchers and their teams to locate their labs here and base themselves in New Zealand. We also announced $34.5 million for Centres of Asia Pacific Excellence (CAPEs) which will be cross-institutional centres of excellence in the language, culture, politics and economics of countries or groups of countries within the Asia-Pacific region.”
The QS Rankings consider academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty to student ratio, citations per faculty, international faculty and international students.
More information about the rankings can be found at http://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/statistics/tertiary-education/univers