[ad id=”187″]By Lukmon Oloyede.
The fifth edition of the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings by Subject has been published on TopUniversities.com with no Nigerian making the list of 1000 top global campuses. However few Africa’s schools from South Africa, Ghana, Uganda and Kenya made the list.
The first African University on the list was University of Cape Town (UCT) at number 141. UCT is South Africa’s oldest university, founded in 1829.
UCT was followed by other SA schools: University of the Witwatersrand (318); Stellenbosch University (390); University of Pretoria (471-480); University of Kwazulu-Natal (501-550); Rhodes University, and University of Johannesburg (601-650).
[ad id=”135″]Other universities from the continent that made the list are: University of Nairobi, Kenya; University of Ghana, Ghana; and Makerere University Kampala, Uganda ranked at 701+.
Many observers from Africa were disappointed that no Nigerian school made the list even though eight Nigerian universities were featured in the rankings of Africa’s top 100 higher education institutions provided by the 4 International Colleges & Universities (4icu) early this year.
The rankings were based on academic reputation, employer reputation, research impact and international outlook. They are calculated by combining the results of surveys of 85,000 academics and almost 42,000 employers, as well as analysis of millions of research papers and academic citations.
US and UK universities dominated the top 100 of the new survey accounting for a combination of 47 schools on the list – 28 and 19 respectively.
[ad id=”169″]The top five on the list are: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), United States; University of Cambridge, United Kingdom and Imperial College London, United Kingdom; Harvard University, United States; and University of Oxford, United Kingdom.
University College London (UCL), United Kingdom; Stanford University, United States; California Institute of Technology (Caltech), United States; Princeton University United States; Yale University, United States; University of Chicago, United States; Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland are ranked 6th to 12th respectively.
Throughout the span in which QS has been publishing the rankings, the very top the table has remained fairly stable, with just some slight shifts in position each year. Indeed, the differences between these top-ranking institutions are incredibly small; all perform impressively well across all of the assessment measures used.
From 2nd position in 2013/14, Harvard University fell to 4th while UK’s Imperial College London, another STEM-focused institution, boasts the biggest leap within the top 10 universities this year, rising from 5th to share second place with the University of Cambridge.
QS World University Rankings is an annual publication of university rankings by British Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) Company. Previously collaborated with Times Higher Education (THE) to publish THE-QS World University Rankings, the publisher has released its own league tables since 2010 using the pre-existing methodology while THE has adopted a new one with Thomson Reuters as Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
The primary aim of the rankings is to help students make informed comparisons between their international study options.
Click here to access the ranking
