February 2015 Grade A for NUI Galway in EU University Ranking

New global university ranking, funded by the EU, announces NUI Galway as only one of two Irish Institutions to achieve all-round top scores on International Orientation

NUI Galway has been given the highest ranking of four A’s in U-Multirank, an EU Commission-led initiative to measure excellence in higher education and research institutions worldwide. The indicators, published this week across Europe show that NUI Galway ranked highest with an A grade in all four performance indicators of international orientation. These related to teaching and learning, doctoral training, research and the composition of academic staff.

These new ‘readymade rankings’ focusing on International Orientation show how 237 Universities in the U-Multirank database perform on internationalisation, using measures spread across teaching and learning, doctoral trainings, international research collaboration and the composition of academic staff. The rankings make this comparison at both the institutional level and in four academic fields: physics, business studies, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering. Just 27 universities out of the 237 – barely one in ten – achieved all-round top scores in the new institutional level ranking.

Professor Brian Hughes, Dean of International Affairs, NUI Galway welcomed the announcement: “NUI Galway is a university that embraces internationalisation in all of its activities. Being connected to the world is part of our everyday reality, and we are delighted to receive this external validation for our international orientation.”

U-Multirank is a new global university ranking funded by the European Commission and takes a different approach to existing global rankings of universities; it is multi-dimensional and compares university performance across a range of different activities grading them from “A” (very good) to “E” (weak). It does not produce a league table of the world’s “top” 100 universities based on composite scores. Instead, it allows users to identify a university’s strengths and weaknesses, or the aspects that most interest them.

“Achieving four ‘A’ scores for international orientation is a significant achievement. Not many institutions are ever likely to accomplish it,” commented Frans van Vught one of the U-Multirank project leaders. “And it is not necessarily the institutions you would expect that perform best: these rankings identify high-performing universities not captured by other rankings with their heavy research focus."

The rankings show that excellence in international orientation is found in widely diverse institutions. The 27 all - round top performing universities come from a wide range of institutions differing in terms of size, sector, mission and age. The 27 top performers are located in 12 different countries.

In further rankings news, NUI Galway has been named in the top 100 most international universities in the world 2015 by THE (Times Higher Education) who compiled a list using the “international outlook” indicator of its World University Rankings methodology. All the institutions that feature in the THE World University Rankings 2014-15 top 400 were considered. This measure considers each institution’s percentage of international staff, its international student numbers and the proportion of its research papers published with a co-author from at least one other country.

Further information on U-Multirank is available at www.umultirank.org and for THE information see www.timeshighereducation.co.uk

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