uni rankings throughout victoria?

[killer_bot]

hey guys,

just got back from nz.

there are 12 different unis in australia victoria.
i was wondering whether somebody could list all these universities from ranking.

i've tried googling but i'm always missing a few and i thought some of the natives here could do a better/quicker job.

[Russ]

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2010-2011/oceania.html

[killer_bot]

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2010-2011/oceania.html

no i mean of all the unis in victoria (not interstate unis), rank them from 1-12 based on rankings.

[pi]

1 - University of Melbourne
2 - Monash University
3 - Deakin University
4 - La Trobe University
5 - Swinburne University of Technology (random edit: this uni has the worst logo of any uni in australia imo)
6+ - Rest...



Source: http://www.australian-universities.com/rankings/

[mark_alec]

What do you want rankings for? Without qualifying what you are looking for (good teaching? good industry connections? high impact research? aesthetic of the campus?) a ranking is pointless.

[Gloamglozer]

What do you want rankings for? Without qualifying what you are looking for (good teaching? good industry connections? high impact research? aesthetic of the campus?) a ranking is pointless.

Yeah this.  And those rankings are more for postgraduates and not really for undergraduates I believe. 

I think it also depends on the students to teaching staff ratio as well because I remember reading (no source unfortunately) something saying that Monash had dropped in The Times Higher Education ranking so much mainly because of that ratio and because since The Times and QS split, The Times has placed emphasis on that ratio.

If anyone can confirm that last paragraph, it would be greatly appreciated.

[killer_bot]

And those rankings are more for postgraduates and not really for undergraduates I believe. 

so for undergraduate degrees would there be a significant difference in the quality of education that a student receives from one australian uni to another?

what exactly is it that distinguishes one uni course to the same course offered by a different institution when it comes to undergraduate courses?

[Russ]

Depends on the situation.

RE: rankings; Rankings do take teaching into account, but they're also very heavily influenced by research capabilities and international connections, which generally aren't relevant to undergrads.

[slothpomba]

Rankings are so dodgy i wouldn't even consider them as an undergrad.

The fact is this - All (pretty much) your professors and lecturers will have PhD's or be highly knowledgeable in the field. This is true no matter if you go to somewhere like ANU or Monash or La Trobe or RMIT. They're not total dropkicks, they're smart, knowledgeable people pretty much anywhere. It's not like the professors at ANU have some secret knowledge those at RMIT don't, especially for undergrad subjects which can be fairly broad and general.

To be honest as a student, rankings aren't the very first things you should be looking at. You dont take the whole university, you take a specific course. You should look at how that course is structured, if you're in something like law or commerce then you should consider how that course and uni are thought about by employees, you should look at oppertunities; At monash for example in one of the developmental biology subjects you can work in a stem cell laboratory for a period of time and Monash also offer subjects in your 3rd year that are like mini-honours. They're full year units and let you do a little research project. You should look at the kind of support the uni provides, the atmosphere, how close it is to where you live, clubs, ect. You have to be a whole lot more holistic.

The fact of the matter is, these things will have a much bigger impact on your day to day experience than rankings ever will.

The ranking methodologies are really dodgy as well. Hardly anyone knows what exactly they plug in and how. Researchers tried to recreate the shanghai jiaotong rankings, using the formulas and data the shanghai ranking people published. The idea is if you use their formulas and data, you should get the same rankings out of it as they did. The researches got something different. So, theres room to fiddle or have some other weird unknowns in there.

Rankings are obviously a pretty good marketing tool for uni's as well and they'll do what they can to boost their rankings without necessarily translating into something good for the average undergrad.

UoM/Monash/La Trobe/Deakin are all pretty decent universities. RMIT is very good and innovative in certain areas as well.

[Planck's constant]

The ranking methodologies are really dodgy as well.

Why? The rankings seem reasonable to me.
Would anyone dispute the worth of the following Universities which always feature in the top dozen or so ?

1 California Institute of Technology  United States 
2 Harvard University  United States   
2 Stanford University  United States
4 University of Oxford  United Kingdom 
5 Princeton University  United States 
6 University of Cambridge  United Kingdom 
7 Massachusetts Institute of Technology  United States 
8 Imperial College London  United Kingdom 
9 University of Chicago  United States 
10 University of California, Berkeley  United States
11 Yale University  United States 
12 Columbia University  United States 

[lynt.br]

Rankings are so dodgy i wouldn't even consider them as an undergrad.

The fact is this - All (pretty much) your professors and lecturers will have PhD's or be highly knowledgeable in the field. This is true no matter if you go to somewhere like ANU or Monash or La Trobe or RMIT. They're not total dropkicks, they're smart, knowledgeable people pretty much anywhere. It's not like the professors at ANU have some secret knowledge those at RMIT don't, especially for undergrad subjects which can be fairly broad and general.

To be honest as a student, rankings aren't the very first things you should be looking at. You dont take the whole university, you take a specific course. You should look at how that course is structured, if you're in something like law or commerce then you should consider how that course and uni are thought about by employees, you should look at oppertunities; At monash for example in one of the developmental biology subjects you can work in a stem cell laboratory for a period of time and Monash also offer subjects in your 3rd year that are like mini-honours. They're full year units and let you do a little research project. You should look at the kind of support the uni provides, the atmosphere, how close it is to where you live, clubs, ect. You have to be a whole lot more holistic.

The fact of the matter is, these things will have a much bigger impact on your day to day experience than rankings ever will.

The ranking methodologies are really dodgy as well. Hardly anyone knows what exactly they plug in and how. Researchers tried to recreate the shanghai jiaotong rankings, using the formulas and data the shanghai ranking people published. The idea is if you use their formulas and data, you should get the same rankings out of it as they did. The researches got something different. So, theres room to fiddle or have some other weird unknowns in there.

Rankings are obviously a pretty good marketing tool for uni's as well and they'll do what they can to boost their rankings without necessarily translating into something good for the average undergrad.

UoM/Monash/La Trobe/Deakin are all pretty decent universities. RMIT is very good and innovative in certain areas as well.

This is very true.

Ranking are ultimately more for the universities sake than for a potential student's.

Rankings can only provide a general overview of what a university will be like, they are hopeless for any specific. Can anyone really say that Harvard and Stanford are better than Oxford or Oxford is better than Princeton? It is a completely arbitrary question that depends on your own expectations and requirements.

Secondly, as KP pointed out, the rankings are obtained by sticking a bunch of factors the institutions considered 'important' into a blender and seeing what number came out. This means the rankings are based on factors you may not even consider important (number of times a professor in your uni has been cited in a journal, staff to student ratio, anything related to post-grad research etc), or may omit factors you consider very important (campus life, clubs, the way in which the course is taught etc).

Personally I don't give a damn how famous my lecturer is (at least for an undergrad degree). All I care about is whether they are a good teacher - and my experience is qualifications do not always correlate with teaching ability. Secondly, do you really need some super famous professor to teach you undergrad stuff?

Essentially the point is those ranking are in-discriminatory. They aren't filtered for your particular degree. They aren't even filtered for undergraduate studies. If you want information, get something targeted and specific to your needs, not some broad umbrella approach.

[killer_bot]

UoM/Monash/La Trobe/Deakin are all pretty decent universities. RMIT is very good and innovative in certain areas as well.

What about Victoria University/Swinburne?
I couldn't help notice you didn't mention them but they seem quite popular unis too.

Also which unis are not decent?

[iamtom]

I read somewhere that, overall, Box Hill TAFE is a better university than Vic U. Cannot find the article any more though.

[killer_bot]

I read somewhere that, overall, Box Hill TAFE is a better university than Vic U. Cannot find the article any more though.

Why does vic uni have such a bad reputation on VN?
Is it actually a bad uni though...?

[pi]

I read somewhere that, overall, Box Hill TAFE is a better university than Vic U. Cannot find the article any more though.

Why does vic uni have such a bad reputation on VN?
Is it actually a bad uni though...?

It's pretty bad tbh.

But in its defense, it wasn't exactly created to become a "great" uni. It was created to mainly cater for the (arguably) poorer Western suburbs, where many would not have had a chance to go to uni if it weren't for VU's existence. It's doing its job decently imo.