Kayle Crosson | Staff Writer
According to the latest QS World University Rankings, Trinity College has retained its academic reputation for being Ireland’s best-performing institution, scoring in the top 200 in 20 out of the 30 disciplines examined in the survey.
Trinity’s obvious strength according to the rankings lie in the arts and humanities departments, with high rankings for English (25th), Politics (46th), History (48th), and Modern Language (42nd). Other Irish universities also performed well on the subject-by-subject survey, with University College Dublin attaining positions within the 51 – 100 brackets for a wide range of subjects. University College Cork and Dublin City University both saw improvements in certain subject areas as well.
However, despite this success, Irish universities were notably absent among the top 100 rankings in fields of mathematics, physics, computer sciences, and all four of the engineering disciplines. Regarding these findings, Ben Sowter, QS Head of Research, attributed Ireland’s absence among the top science and mathematics institutions to the rise of science departments in Asia in his comments to The Irish Times: “Increased international competition from Asia is making it difficult for Ireland’s universities to keep pace, especially in the Stem disciplines.”
However, Trinity does hold scientific importance on the world stage, as the college, in partnership with University College Cork, established the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructure and Nanodevices (CRANN) in 2003, which is internationally recognised as a leading institute for nanoscience research.
The QS survey is one the world’s leading university ranking institutions, ranking 689 institutions on a subject-by-subject basis from a long list of almost 3,000 colleges. When speaking to The Irish Times, the authors of the survey said that judging higher education by this method indicates “traditional big-hitters such as the Ivy League and Oxbridge may no longer be dominating global academia.”
Photo by Gearoid Gibbs
