UniRankDex — Australian university rankings platform
All 41 Australian universities ranked on official public data — satisfaction, employment, salaries and employer perception — with 820 head-to-head comparison pages.
Rankings built on outcomes, not reputation
Traditional league tables reward prestige. UniRankDex — an own product I designed, built and operate — approaches the choice the way a student actually experiences it: where are students most satisfied, who lands a full-time job fastest, which campuses lead on early-career pay and employer perception. Everything runs on official Australian public data.
The whole site is structured around real search questions — best university for satisfaction, salary, a field, a state, or a direct head-to-head — with the stated goal of taking users from vague intent to a genuine shortlist in a few clicks.
Core features
- Outcome-based leaderboards. National rankings for student satisfaction, graduate employment, graduate salaries and employer satisfaction.
- University detail pages. Every institution gets a profile with benchmark context, FAQs and its numbers set against the national picture.
- 820 compare pages. One page for every university pairing, giving a cleaner trade-off view when two options keep surviving your shortlist.
- State and field hubs. 8 state-level hubs plus field pages built for long-tail queries such as best universities in Victoria.
- Decision filters. Compare by student experience, employment, salary, field strength, city and group membership such as the Group of Eight.
- Editorial guides. Explainer content that links intent-driven questions back to the underlying dataset pages, so research never dead-ends.
Scope and coverage
A taste of the granularity: the current number one, The University of Melbourne, shows 91.80% satisfaction, 89.40% employment and a $78,200 salary figure on its profile. Explore it yourself: Visit unirankdex.com.
Behind the scenes
UniRankDex is fully custom: a Laravel + PHP backend over a MySQL database designed to render thousands of pages — 41 profiles, 820 comparisons, state and field hubs — with fast load times and no template or plugin dependencies. Each page type is its own view fed straight from the dataset.
The interesting engineering problem was programmatic SEO at comparison scale: 820 unique pairings that must read like natural editorial, not a cloned table, and that recompute automatically whenever the underlying public data refreshes.
Frequently asked questions
How is UniRankDex different from prestige-based rankings?
It ranks on official public outcome data — student satisfaction, graduate full-time employment, early-career salary, employer satisfaction and enrolment — so you can shortlist universities on measurable results rather than brand reputation alone.
How many universities and comparisons does it include?
All 41 registered Australian universities, connected through 820 pairwise comparison pages, 8 state-level hubs and field-of-study pages for long-tail research like best universities in Victoria or health degrees in Australia.
Should I use it instead of official admissions guidance?
No — and the site says so explicitly. It is a shortlist tool: filter with the rankings, check benchmark context on each university page, open a compare page when two options keep surviving. Admissions and accreditation checks belong to official channels.
Which university currently ranks first?
The University of Melbourne leads the seeded dataset at rank 1, with 91.80% student satisfaction, 89.40% graduate employment and a $78,200 median early-career salary.
Related own products
Sister platforms built on Australian public datasets.