Written by Anushka Vineet and Punyashree Venkatram
With the year drawing to a close, it is fair to say that 2025 has been tumultuous. With the community outrage with Renew ANU, the recent resignation of Genevive Bell, and the constant negative mainstream media attention, positive news has been hard to come by.
Recently, the 2026 University Rankings by Times Higher Education (THE) were released. For the first time since 2022, ANU did not drop in the rankings; however, it did not climb the ladder either, holding its position at number 73.
However, is this positive news? Observer breaks down the criteria and the subrankings to answer the age-old question: is ANU still a reputable university?
ANU has been quick to capitalise on the rankings with social media promotional material advertising this year’s success stories. Among Australia’s Group of Eight (Go8) Universities, ANU has the lowest student-to-staff ratio and has the “most international outlook”.
The Go8 comprises “Australia’s leading research-intensive universities”. Formed and incorporated in 1999, the universities include the ANU, University of Melbourne, University of Sydney, University of Queensland, Monash University, University of Western Australia, University of Adelaide, and UNSW Sydney.
The Go8 normally have a “stranglehold” on the Australian rankings; however, for the first time since its creation, a non-Go8 university, the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), managed to break up the eight. Now, UTS is ranked equal 145th with the University of Western Australia.
THE rankings consider five core areas, which it refers to as the pillars for assessing universities. Each one of these pillars contains multiple performance indicators.
The first pillar, ‘teaching’, is ANU’s worst score at 56.7. Evaluated on the quality of teaching, the indicators include the teaching reputation (calculated from an academic survey), staff-to-student ratio, doctorate-to-bachelor’s ratio, doctorates-awarded-to-academic-staff ratio, and institutional income per academic staff.
The second and third pillars refer to the university’s ‘research environment’ and ‘research quality’. They interrogate the university’s role in “spreading new knowledge and ideas” as well as looking at the volume of research, and the income and reputation it gains.
The fourth pillar looks at the impact that ANU has on ‘industry’ by analysing the university’s “ability to help industry with innovations and inventions”.
Finally, the fifth pillar, which ANU scored highest on with 94.2, is ANU’s ‘international outlook’. This refers to the university’s ability “to attract [international] undergraduates, postgraduates and faculty”.
After the release of the rankings, THE noted that Australia bucked the trend of declining rankings, unlike our European and American counterparts. These Western universities “lost ground to several fast-improving East and South-east Asian contenders” such as Peking University, Singapore University, and Nanyang Technological University.
Among Australian universities, ANU placed 4th behind the University of Melbourne, University of Sydney, and Monash University.
But, is ANU a reputable university? The answer depends on which pillars you consider most important when choosing a university. Though four years ago, in the 2022 rankings, we were 59th globally and 2nd in Australia, ANU scored worse in teaching at just 49.8.
Thus, without looking deeper into the rankings, the reputation and prestige of ANU cannot be solely based on one number.
So, maybe 73 is ANU’s new lucky number? Maybe next year, ANU will finally start climbing the rankings? Perhaps in the future ANU can regain its position as the number 1 Australian university?
We will have to see what happens in the 2027 rankings.
Graphics by Fatima Usman
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