Australia’s best city for students: Melbourne
Melbourne is the best city in Australia for students, according to one of the world’s most respected higher education ratings agencies.
Just months after being named the world’s most liveable city by The Economist’s annual ranking, Melbourne has been commended in the first ever QS Best Student Cities survey.
It was named the fourth best city in the world for students, and the best in Australia, ahead of Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide. Kuala Lumpur, the location of Monash University’s Malaysian campus, also made the top 50.
The survey found that when deciding on a university, students looked beyond courses, also taking into account the lifestyle that a university, and its location, offered. Among the factors measured were affordability, quality of life, favourable employment prospects and climate.
The quality of the city’s tertiary institutions was also a crucial factor in the ratings. Monash has five campuses in Melbourne – Berwick, Caulfield, Clayton, Parkville and Peninsula (as well as a regional Victorian campus in Gippsland).
In 2011, QS, which releases it World University Rankings annually, rated Monash 60th in the world and one of the top 30 in numerous academic disciplines, among them Accounting and Finance, Law, Sociology, History and International Studies.