Australia's first university

The University of Sydney, founded in 1850, is Australia's first university, and has an international reputation for outstanding teaching, as a centre of research excellence and as an active and engaged community leader.

The University of Sydney continues to rise in global rankings, confirming its place within the top 40 universities in the world. The University’s humanities teaching and research was ranked fifth best in the world in the UK’s Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) World University Rankings published in October 2006, while the University as a whole was ranked 35th in the world in the same league table. In the Newsweek global 100 for 2006, the University of Sydney was one of two Australian universities placed in the top 50 in the world.

As one of Australia’s leading universities, the University of Sydney is a key member of:

• the Group of Eight – representing Australia’s leading research-intensive universities
• Academic Consortium 21 (AC21) – an international network of educational, research and industrial organisations in Asia, the United States and Europe
• the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) – Sydney is one of three Australian institutions in this group of prestigious universities drawn from Asia, the United States and South America, and
• the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) – an international alliance of 16 leading research universities.