Business

Ranking the 11 best universities in South Africa

Staff Writer

 ·24 Oct 2017

US News & World Report has released the 2018 Best Global Universities rankings – which includes a list of the top 11 tertiary learning institutions in South Africa.

The overall rankings evaluate 1,250 universities – up from 1,000 last year – across 74 countries and are the largest and most comprehensive assessment of research universities worldwide, it says.

The US leads the rankings again this year, with 221 universities making the overall list. The top four spots are held by US schools, with Harvard University at No. 1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology comes in at No. 2, followed by Stanford University at No. 3 and the University of California—Berkeley at No. 4. The United Kingdom’s University of Oxford rounds out the top five.

Behind the US, the following countries have the most ranked institutions out of the 1,250 schools on the overall list:

• China: 136
• Japan: 76
• UK: 73
• Germany: 58

For the 2018 edition, US News made a slight change to the methodology to further emphasize international collaboration at universities by rewarding schools that author articles with researchers from different countries.

The Best Global Universities methodology – which is based on Web of Science data and metrics provided by Clarivate Analytics InCites – weighs factors that measure a university’s global and regional research reputation and academic research performance.

For the overall rankings, this includes bibliometric indicators such as publications, citations and international collaboration. Each subject ranking has its own methodology based on academic research performance and reputation in that specific area.

Top 10 Universities in the world:

For South Africa, the University of Cape Town sits just outside the top 100, followed by the University of Witwatersrand, which placed 216th overall.

There are a host of university rankings throughout the course of the year, with UCT usually featuring at the top of the list locally.

However, Wits University was ranked as the top university in South Africa for the fourth year in a row in the 2017 Center for World University Rankings (CWUR), published earlier in October.

The CWUR claims to be the only global university ranking that measures the quality of education and training of students, as well as the prestige of the faculty members and the quality of their research, without relying on surveys and university data submissions.

Top Universities in South Africa:

Across the 22 subject-specific rankings, US schools again claim the most No. 1 spots. For the first time, China’s Tsinghua University replaces MIT as No. 1 in computer science and once again tops the list for engineering.

Listed in rank order, these countries performed the best in the following subject rankings:

• Computer science: US, China, UK, Canada, Australia
• Economics and business: US, UK, Australia, Canada, China (tie), Netherlands (tie)
• Engineering: US, China, UK, Canada, Italy

“The schools that rank the highest in the Best Global Universities rankings are those that emphasize academic research, including by partnering with international scholars to produce highly cited articles,” said Robert Morse, chief data strategist at US News.

Read: South Africa’s best universities for getting a job in 2018