“At the top of the table, Melbourne will have bragging rights: it now boasts Australia’s number one and number two universities,” he said.

Monash was among the biggest improvers nationally, jumping from 57th to 44th place, overtaking the University of Queensland, the University of Sydney and the Australian National University compared with last year’s rankings.

The rankings are important for universities in their quest to attract international students, a $37 billion industry for Australia before the pandemic hit, and an essential source of revenue for tertiary institutions.

But the rankings are also controversial, with some experts arguing they overemphasise universities’ research output, at the expense of teaching.

Sixty per cent of the ranking points universities accrue are based on research and citations, compared with 30 per cent for teaching.

This month, the Productivity Commission warned that rankings detract from universities’ incentive to invest in quality teaching.

“International rankings, which are heavily weighted towards research outputs, play an important role in attracting students, particularly international students. This means that universities’ incentives are poorly aligned with delivering quality teaching,” the commission said in its interim report on Australia’s education system.

For the seventh straight year, Oxford University has landed top position, followed by Harvard Cambridge, Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Higher education expert Professor Andrew Norton, from ANU’s Centre for Social Research and Methods, said a big shift in a university’s ranking could have financial repercussions because international students do follow them, particularly in China.

But he said they had negligible influence in the domestic market, where the ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admission Ranking) drives student choice.

“The trouble with this ranking is it has a large number of elements to it, and it includes things that are subjective, like a reputation survey,” Norton said.

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