These are the best subjects to study at South Africa’s top universities

If you want to study hospitality industry, you should look to the University of Johannesburg, which now ranks as the 18th best hospitality and tourism school in the world.

This is one of the findings from the Academic Ranking of World Universities’ (ARWU) latest report on academic subjects – which highlights the subjects that global universities (including South Africa’s) excel in.

The ranking system is heavily focused on research quality, impact, and collaboration, and assesses more than 1,600 institutions from 83 countries across 54 subjects in five broad subject areas.

These include: natural sciences, engineering, life sciences, medical sciences, and social sciences.

For each field of study, the top 500 universities are listed, with 12 South African universities ranked among them in almost all fields.

Where South African institutes generally excel is in social sciences, with the  country’s top universities also featuring in the natural sciences, life sciences and certain engineering fields.

Engineering is generally South Africa’s weakest area, with our universities showing in only seven of the 22 subject fields – featuring most prominently in the mining and mineral engineering category.

While South African universities mostly rank in the lower-reaches of each category (outside of the top 200), several made it into the top 100, and even the top 50.

The University of Johannesburg attained the highest ranking of all SA universities, listed as the 18th best university in the world for its hospitality and tourism courses (up from 20th in 2018). Wits University meanwhile ranked as the 44th best university in the world for its mining engineering courses, and in the top 75 for public health sciences and clinical medicine courses.

The University of Cape Town ranked 20th in the world for its mining engineering courses, and 36th for oceanography, while the University of Pretoria ranked 45th overall for veterinary sciences.

The University of Cape Town featured in the most subject rankings (23), but the University of Pretoria ranked in the most engineering fields (6).

Below, we’ve listed the best fields of study across all 12 South African universities featured, ordered by highest to lowest rank.

University of Cape Town

University of Pretoria

Stellenbosch University

Wits University

University of KwaZulu Natal

University of Johannesburg

North-West University

University of the Western Cape

Rhodes University

Nelson Mandela University

University of the Free State

University of South Africa

Read: 5 awesome business ideas from the minds of South African university students