Local universities feature in world’s top rankings
• Efforts towards excellence are paying dividends, writes Penny Haw
Evaluating universities on 13 performance metrics that are grouped into the five broad categories of teaching, research, citations, international outlook and industry income, the 2018 edition of the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings was released earlier this month.
Eight South African institutions made it into the THE’s world’s top 1,000 universities. The University of Cape Town (UCT) was listed in the top 200; the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), University of Stellenbosch and University of KwaZulu-Natal were ranked in the top 500; while the University of Pretoria, University of Johannesburg (UJ), University of the Western Cape, and University of SA make up the eight.
There were some declines. Affected by issues such as student protests and insufficient funding, both UCT and Wits scored lower than previous years. Among the universities showing improvement was UJ, which, in its second year in the rankings, moved up 87 places and improved on last year’s scores in all five categories.
Commenting on the improvement, senior director of UJ’s division for institutional planning, evaluation and monitoring, Trish Gibbon, says success in the rankings is the upshot of the university’s efforts towards excellence.
“UJ’s primary commitment is to epitomise what it means to be a post-apartheid university in a democratic SA,” she says. “We have vigorously pursued a research agenda with a panAfrican focus that is locally relevant and internationally significant, and provided the best possible teaching and learning opportunities for our students and staff.”
The university has invested heavily in the teaching and learning. “UJ’s global presence and reputation have been growing significantly through its participation in high-level, international gatherings of university leaders and collaborative relationships with universities around the world,” says Gibbon. This has also been boosted by the appointment of distinguished professors, including Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, and the hosting of events, conferences and international visitors such as Barack Obama, Thomas Piketty and Mohamed ElBaradei.
UJ’s most notable THE improvement was in the citations category, where it increased by 12.8 points — that is, a 54.5% improvement. The university also saw an increase of 5.1 points in the research category, which is a 27.7% improvement. While the achievements, says Gibbon, weren’t unexpected, they are significant given what’s happening in higher education in SA at present.
“We knew our increased research output and citations would definitely have an impact, as would the strong focus we have on developing an international profile in both our student body and academic staff,” says Gibbon. “But in rankings, these things are always relative to the increases and improvements achieved by other institutions, and relative to growth in the overall pool. In some countries governments have made massive investments in some higher education institutions to achieve ‘world class’ status and advance in ranking systems. In this context, we welcome the fact that we still received international recognition of our accomplishments.”
As a result of its improved THE ranking, UJ was the only African university among 27 international universities to be nominated for the Global Excellence in Teaching Award, which was organised in partnership with THE.
“Our real achievements though, lie in making it possible for more than 12,000 young people to graduate from UJ every year and our researchers to produce new knowledge,” says Gibbon. “In these ways, we hope to contribute to the improvement of our society and our world.”