Irish third-level institutions have failed to make it into the top 100 of a new world university rankings list because of a lack of funding for the sector, the Irish Universities Association (IUA) has said.
The annual league table, complied by British publication the Times Higher Education Supplement, listed only one Irish university, Trinity College Dublin, in the the top 200.
None of the six others - UCD, NUI Maynooth, NUI Galway, UCC, University of Limerick or DCU - make any impression on the highly-regarded rankings.
Michael McGrath, director of the IUA, which represents the heads of the seven Irish universities, said colleges here could not meet the performance criteria in three of the six categories, which resulted in a low overall ranking.
Universities are given marks for the number of international members of the faculty; the number of international students in the faculty; citations or publications produced; faculty- to-student ratio; a review of their peers, and a recruitment review.
TCD made it into the top 100 last year at number 87, but slipped this year to 111, after receiving a mark of just five out of 100 in its faculty-to-student ratio score.
"Irish universities have been under-resourced for the last 20 years and there has been an exponential growth in the university population, principally of school-leavers," Mr McGrath said. "The resources haven't kept pace with this increase, meaning there are more students for fewer lecturers."
Ireland lagged far behind other countries in terms of the number of international students and academics, he said. While there had been a recent increase in funding for research, it would take five years before this was reflected in the rankings.
US and British universities are at the top, with Harvard at number one, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Cambridge; Oxford and the University of California at Berkeley.
