UP among top schools in emerging economies

The University of the Philippines is the only Philippine higher education institution that was included in the list of top schools in emerging economies worldwide, according to the latest rankings released by London-based Time Higher Education (THE) this week.

UP ranked 166th among 378 tertiary institutions, significantly improving its ranking from last year’s 201-250.

This is the first time that UP entered the upper half of the list, which ranks universities in countries classified by the Financial Times Stock Exchange as advanced emerging, secondary emerging or frontier economies.

Excluded are universities from advanced countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Singapore and South Korea that are home to some of the world’s top higher education institutions.

Only 51 countries were eligible to be considered in the emerging economies’ top university ranking, including the Philippines that is classified as a secondary emerging economy along with China, India, Indonesia and Russia.

Other eligible Southeast Asian countries were Malaysia and Thailand that are advanced emerging economies, and Vietnam, which is classified as a frontier economy.

Chinese universities dominated the list, with 63 schools from China listed in the top 378, including Peking University and Tsinghua University that ranked first and second, respectively, for the fifth consecutive year.

They were followed by Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia and Fudan University, University of Science and Technology of China, Zhejiang University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Nanjing University that are all in China.

Completing the top 10 are University of Cape Town in South Africa and National Taiwan University.

The ranking is based on 13 performance indicators grouped into five areas: teaching (the learning environment), research (volume, income and reputation), citations (research influence), international outlook (staff, students and research) and industry income (knowledge transfer).

“The Times Higher Education World University Rankings are the only global performance tables that judge research-intensive universities across all their core missions: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook,” said the global index provider.