Every New Zealand university except Otago has pulled out of a three-year slump in worldwide rankings, an annual report released today shows.
The QS World University Rankings, which bills itself as ''by far the most popular annual league table of world universities'', judges universities on a wide variety of metrics, including academic reputation, research output, and faculty-student ratio.
For the 2015-16 rankings, the University of Otago placed in the top 100 for attracting international faculty, arts and humanities, and social sciences and management.
Otago vice-chancellor Prof Harlene Hayne said the university's rating on attracting academic staff - 27th worldwide - proved it was ''an extremely attractive option for highly qualified academic staff from throughout the world''.
And Otago retained its second-place spot out of New Zealand universities, coming in after Auckland for the fifth year running.
But in overall rankings, Otago dropped 14 spots this year - to 173 from 159 - even as the other seven New Zealand universities increased their scores for the first time in three years.
Prof Hayne said the changes were due mostly to QS adjusting how certain kinds of research were weighted in calculating the overall score.
''[The adjustment] tends to penalise strongly science and medicine-focused research universities such as Otago ... It is concerning in the sense that a technical change has been made that impacts on our score, but it doesn't actually reflect anything more than that.''
Universities New Zealand head Chris Whelan agreed.
''[Other universities'] big ranking increases this year are mostly the result of this change.''
Before this year's change, Mr Whelan said, universities with medical schools were more likely to get a higher ranking.
''Otago, with a world-class medical school doing world-class medical research ... [was] just caught out by a technical change,'' he said.
''Otago's not doing anything worse.''
Mr Whelan acknowledged that Auckland was able to climb 10 spots - from 92nd place last year to 82nd this year - despite also having a medical school.
''But [Auckland] also has a whole lot of top-50 ranked subjects ... where it would've lost out on the medical school, it gained on other subjects.''
On yet another measure - the assessment of graduates' employability according to employers, or ''employer reputation'' - all New Zealand universities lost ground this year, which the QS highlighted as a potentially worrying indicator.
The news came just as Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce announced that universities, wananga and polytechnics would be required to publish databases of the employment outcomes of their students by 2017.
The timing was ''a pure coincidence'', Mr Joyce said.
Nonetheless, the QS rankings proved employability was ''something that universities will want to work on''.
Publishing the databases might help with that, he said.
''It's designed to not only help students but also help individual universities and polytechs to get direct and objective feedback on how students are doing.''
Plus, Mr Joyce added, ''naturally enough, everyone's competitive - they want to see their organisation do well''.
Mr Whelan said employer reputation was ''obviously a metric that we watch with interest'', but he could not say if the latest QS report was cause for concern.
''It's very hard for us to see below the line and see exactly what was it that employers were answering,'' he said.
''It's quite a long survey. You've got to be fairly committed to do it.''
