[imagesource: Getty]

Eventually, many years after leaving tertiary education, people tend to become less interested in rankings like those recently released by the Centre for World University Rankings (CWUR).

Unless you live in Cape Town, where you’re expected to reveal which school and university you attended during any standard greeting.

Good news for Capetonians, then, with UCT coming out tops among South African universities, although it only placed 269th in the global ranking.

BusinessTech reports that 19 788 institutions were ranked this year, with 13 South African institutions ranking among the top 2 000.

South Africa’s universities continued to fare poorly in the rankings, with all but three local institutes dropping down the list. This follows the trend seen in 2020, where only two universities managed to climb the rankings.

While many of the drops on the rankings were marginal – by only a few places – some were much larger, like the University of the Western Cape, which fell 80 places.

According to CWUR, the rankings are done using “seven objective and robust indicators grouped into four areas”:

1) Quality of Education, measured by the number of a university’s alumni who have won major academic distinctions relative to the university’s size (25%)
2) Alumni Employment, measured by the number of a university’s alumni who have held top executive positions at the world’s largest companies relative to the university’s size (25%)
3) Quality of Faculty, measured by the number of faculty members who have won major academic distinctions (10%)
4) Research Performance [40%, based on Research Output, High-Quality Publications, Influence, and Citations]

SA’s full top five, in order, is UCT, the University of the Witwatersrand, Stellenbosch University, University of KwaZulu-Natal, and the University of Pretoria.

The rest of the top 10 can be seen below:

Image: CWUR

You can see the full-sized image here.

Rhodes University may have only just snuck into the top 10, but it does boast an Oscar winner among its ranks.

Globally, Harvard University came out tops, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Oxford.

Here’s the global top 10:

Image: CWUR

You can see the full-sized image here.

I can only imagine how much any Capetonian who went to UCT, and then studied further at Harvard, is chomping at the bit to tell you within seconds of first meeting.

[sources:bustech&cwur]