QS Rankings 2025: Three Australian Universities in Worlds Top 20

The University of Melbourne, rising from 14^th to 13^th is joined in the global top 20 by the University of Sydney (18^th, up from 19^th) and the University of New South Wales (19^th, no change) in QS 2025 World University Rankings, released today.

According to QS, unlike its peers in the United States and United Kingdom, Australian higher education has remained resilient this year in the face of accelerating improvements from Asian institutions, consolidating the progress that it made in last year’s ranking. While two-thirds of featured US institutions have declined in rank year-on-year, and only 22% of British universities have improved their rank, almost half of Australia’s entrants (47%) are upwardly mobile in the 2025 edition. This resilience is driven by:

• Outstanding Sustainability performance, with the University of Sydney (7^th) and University of Melbourne (9^th) ranking among the global top 10 for this metric.
• The increasing regard in which Australian universities are held by the global academic community. 58% of Australia’s universities have improved their score in the Academic Reputation metric over the last year, which captures the sentiment of over 175,000 academic faculty members globally.
• World-leading levels of internationalisation, with three Australian universities (The University of Sydney, The University of Queensland, and Monash University) achieving perfect scores for QS’s International Students indicator.
• Enduringly strong research impact: the University of Western Australia (30^th), University of Technology Sydney (39^th) and University of New South Wales (49^th) are among the world’s top 50 research institutions, adjusted for faculty size.

Though Australia’s results remain strong, there are indications at the individual metric level that the country’s universities are also subject to increasing international competition in key mission areas, particularly employability and teaching capacity. These include:

• 82% of Australian universities have recorded lower year-on-year scores in QS’ Employment Outcomes indicator
• 76% of Australian universities have received lower year-on-year relative scores from over 105,000 employers worldwide,
  captured in the Employer Reputation metric
• No Australian university ranks among the top 300 for QS’s measure of teaching capacity, Faculty/Student Ratio.
  • The national leader is Bond University, whose score of 47.8/100 is the world’s 326^th-best.
  • The only other Australian university to rank among the global top-500 for this metric is Australian National University,
    whose score of 34.6/100 places it 457^th.
• This year’s world rankings feature 1500 universities from 106 different higher education systems and are based on the analysis of over 17.5 million academic papers
  and Insights from 175,798 academics and 105,476 employers. Australia is home to 38 ranked universities: only 9 countries have more.

Australian Universities

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