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Education Minister Ruairi Quinn today launched U-Multirank, a new university ranking system, at Dublin Castle. The Minister launched the system as part of Ireland's EU Presidency during a Presidency conference.

The new system marks a radical departure from the traditional methods of grading higher education institutions which tend to focus mainly on research performance. Five areas are measured: reputation for research, quality of teaching and learning, international orientation, success in knowledge transfer (such as partnerships with business and start-ups), and contribution to regional growth.

Some 500 universities are expected to sign up to take part, with the first rankings results expected in early 2014.

Minister Quinn said:

Quality and equity are two of the key themes of the education dimension to Ireland’s Presidency of the EU and the new U-Multirank is an excellent example of this. We are strongly committed to helping roll-out the next phase of the ranking system and I would urge higher education institutions across Europe and beyond to seize the opportunity to become involved in this new and impartial way of assessing their performance.

There has been strong Irish involvement in the project to date with six HEIs taking part in the first phase: University College Dublin, Cork Institute of Technology, Dublin Institute of Technology, Galway/Mayo Institute of Technology, IT Tallaght and IT Sligo.

Androulla Vassiliou, European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth also attended the conference today.

The Commissioner said:

The new ranking proposed by the European Commission will, above all, enable young people to make better informed decisions about where to study; it will also allow universities to compare themselves in a more transparent and useful way. The new listing will differ from existing international rankings by rating universities according to a broad range of performance factors, which will provide a more accurate, comparable and user-friendly guide to university quality. I encourage all Irish universities to participate in this initiative.

she concluded.

Read the full press release here.