Australian architecture schools have, for the most part, fallen slightly in the latest edition of the annual QS World University Rankings.
The University of Melbourne and University of Sydney continue to rank most highly among Australian schools, coming in at 17th and 18th respectively, with the latter sharing the spot with China’s Tongji University. In 2019, University of Sydney was ranked 15th and Melbourne was 17th.
RMIT University placed at 25th, down from 22nd. The University of New South Wales fell out of the top 25, to 27th
Curtin University, Monash University, Queensland University of Technology, the University of Technology Sydney, and the University of Queensland were all ranked between 51 and 100.
The University of Newcastle, the University of Adelaide, the University of South Australia, and the University of Western Australia were placed between 101 and 150.
A university’s ranking is determined by a number of factors, including the school’s academic and employer reputation, assessed through an international survey, the number of citations per research paper, and their H-index, which is based on the institution’s most cited papers and the number of citations that the institution receives in other publications in a given subject.
The methodology used by ranking bodies like QS, and the prominence given to them by the universities themselves, have been the subject of criticism in the past.
Australia has 20 architecture programs accredited for the purpose of entry to the architectural practice exam.
The QS World Rankings for the top 25 universities for architecture and the built environment in 2020 are:
1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – United States
2. Delft University of Technology – Netherlands
3. University College London (UCL) – United Kingdom
4. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) – Switzerland
5. Harvard University – United States
6. University of California, Berkeley (UCB) – United States
7. Polytechnic University of Milan (Politecnico di Milano) – Italy
8. Manchester School of Architecture – United Kingdom
9. University of Cambridge – United Kingdom
10. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)) – Switzerland
11. Tsinghua University – China
12. National University of Singapore (NUS) – Singapore
13. Columbia University – United States
14. The University of Hong Kong – Hong Kong
15. University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) – United States
16. The University of Tokyo – Japan
17. The University of Melbourne – Australia
18=. The University of Sydney – Australia
18=. Tongji University – China
20. KTH Royal Institute of Technology – Sweden
21. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Barcelona Tech) – Spain
22. Hong Kong Polytechnic University – Hong Kong
23. The University of Sheffield – United Kingdom
24. Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin) – Berlin
25. RMIT University – Australia
