Trinity college quality didn’t flunk the ranks; just that more or less 40 universities worldwide have taken a more aggressive approach in improving their ranks.
Trinity College quality
Trinity College is known to be Ireland’s top-ranked university. Located at the heart of Dublin city center, it caters to 17,000 undergraduate and post-graduate students.
The college is known for various programs namely; Foreign languages, Literature, Psychology, Social sciences, Linguistics, and Biological and Biomedical sciences.
Ranked as the top university in Ireland, many people got wary when it suddenly went down a few ranks in the recently released Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings.
Trinity administrators are quick to back the result, “The College’s overall score didn’t go down, but it improved. The problem is that other universities also improved at a faster rate.”
Trinity College Dublin has dropped 44 places in the latest global university rankings, in a further blow to Ireland’s reputation on the world stage. #stanford https://t.co/6XzPukA3tP pic.twitter.com/4Vdz7xLn7i
— M7Admit (@m7admit) September 20, 2019
The school administration is still confident that they are still considered a top-ranked university in Ireland. The college is aiming to perform even better but cannot push through because of lacking funds.
This has been a problem that’s haunting the university lately, fewer investments mean fewer funds for research and equipment upgrades.
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data shows that Ireland spends less on third-level education compared to other states in England. Underinvestment in a time when there is a rise in the number of students poses a serious problem in the quality of education given.
Less funding results into lack of proper laboratory equipment, lack of classrooms, research funds, and imbalance professor to student ratio per class.
Priority for Government funds
Ireland does not have enough money to allot enough budgets on numerous sectors at the same time. The government focuses mainly on industry and job creation, which leaves education in a bit down-sided.
The lack of fund support from the government has led to only 12 research grant for the past three years. The lack of research produced by the university harmed its ranking and reputation.
Just like the situation in other universities that has great potential but with limited funding, scholars tend to transfer to other well-funded universities to push their researches.
In a recently concluded European Research Council, where six of the seven Irish awardees were working for universities outside of Ireland.
The talent is there but the funds are lacking. Researches won’t push through without funding, which is why Ireland is slowly slipping out of contention in the top-ranked universities worldwide.
