Australian National University was the only Group of Eight university to go backwards, dropping four places to 128 compared to last year.
“While it is encouraging to see Australia making gains in the rankings, funding to promote the development and reputation of Australia’s higher education system is vital if the country aspires to be more competitive on the world stage,” said Dr Mahassen.
“Efforts must be made to ensure that Australia attracts top academics and students, that increasing enrolment numbers at universities come alongside increases in teaching capacity and that tertiary education expenditure as a percentage of GDP steadily grows in the years to come.”
The positive results come as a national review of education chaired by former NSW chief scientist Mary O’Kane is examining all aspects of the sector, including teaching, research and funding.
However, universities are increasingly alarmed that calls to stabilise research funding, and make it less reliant on international student fees, have gone unheard.
While Science Minister Ed Husic has said that he wants to see research and development funding rise to 3 per cent of GDP by 2030, there was nothing in last week’s budget to set that in motion.
Australia’s spending on research sits at just 1.8 per cent of GDP compared with 2.25 per cent in 2008. The OECD average is 2.68 per cent.
Catriona Jackson, chief executive of peak group Universities Australia, says government spending on research is at its lowest share of GDP, plummeting to 0.49 per cent in 2022-23.
“We are increasingly reliant on international student fees to pay for this work, which is highly unsustainable and underscores the urgent need for change,” Ms Jackson said.
Australia is unique among countries with sophisticated higher education systems in its reliance on international student fees to fund research efforts.
Despite this, Australian universities continue to rise on most ranking league tables.
Dr Mahassen said this year’s ranking found 80 per cent of US universities decline in their position on the previous year. The same was true for institutions in France, Germany and Japan although well-resourced Chinese institutions are continuing their rise on the ladder.
For the 12th year in a row, Harvard was named the best university in the world, followed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford. Oxford and Cambridge came fourth and fifth respectively.
While university rankings have proliferated in recent years and are influential in where many students, particularly international students, choose to study, the CWUR is considered by experts to be the most fundamentally sound in its methodology.
Unlike rankings such as QS and Times Higher Education, CWUR does not use opinion-based surveys of academics and alumni, but relies on publicly accessible sources of information in four areas: education, employability, staff and research.