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The ShanghaiRanking Consultancy has just published its 2022 Academic Ranking of World Universities.

Out of the 1 000 universities deemed the best in the world, nine are here in South Africa.

The major crème de la crème of tertiary institutions remain located in the United States (with 196 among the top 1 000 universities) and the United Kingdom (with 63 in the top 1 000), as per usual.

China isn’t too so far off the US with 186 universities ranked in the top 1 000.

For the 20th year in a row, Harvard University is the number one place to get the big D, with Stanford University in second place, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) levelling up one position to third, per BusinessTech.

Experts from around the world rank the best universities based on a set of metrics, including how many Nobel Prizes an institution won in the year and how many papers its staff published in academic journals.

To level the playing field between large and small universities, the results are divided by the number of full-time equivalent academic staff at each university.

In South Africa, the University of Cape Town ranked top, falling within the top 300 universities in the world, per Business Insider:

It was neck-and-neck with Wits in many important metrics, but pulled ahead in a measure of highly cited researchers, with a score of 11.8 versus the 6.8 given to Wits.

That reflects a 2021 list of the world’s thousand important researchers, among which three were primarily affiliated with UCT, and only one was from Wits.

Further in the local ranking, the University of the Witwatersrand is second (falling in the top 400 global universities), ahead of Stellenbosch, the University of Johannesburg, and the University of Pretoria (all in the top 500).

UJ saw a nice little jump, climbing into the top 401-500 institutions globally in 2022, up from the 601 – 700 list of last year.

The University of KwaZulu-Natal also climbed from the 601 – 700 list to the 501-600 list.

Image: BusinessTech

While the University of Pretoria shared third place with the University of Johannesburg and Stellenbosch, it was ahead of both in per-capita rankings.

As for Stellenbosch, it wasn’t too far ahead of UJ in per-capita rankings, managing to beat UJ thanks to a higher score when it came to highly-cited researchers.

Although, UJ appears in the list of the world’s top researchers six times more often than Stellenbosch.

[sources:businessinsider&businesstech]