Back in 2011 Malcolm Gladwell gave the UN News college rankings a scorcher of a serve – making the now standard criticism “there’s no direct way to measure the quality of an institution—how well a college manages to inform, inspire, and challenge its students.”

This did USN as much as no damage at all and since then it has expanded its rankings from the US to the world, with this year’s just out. The ranking inputs are much the same as many others (research rep, citations, publications and so on) and, strange to relate, so are the results.

It is certainly the case for the ranking of ANZ universities which names the usual universities in the global 100. UniMelb (26^th in the world), UniSydney (=34^th), UniQueensland (45^th), Monash U (68^th), ANU (=69^th), UNSW (=69^th), UWA (88^th) UniAuckland (=138^th) and UniOtago (=217).

All up 40 institutions are ranked with Southern Cross U just making the cut at =494^th in the world.