UCT Shines in World Rankings

University of Cape Town

The QS World University Rankings by Subject, released on Wednesday, 8 May 2013, have ranked the University of Cape Town (UCT) among the top 100 universities in the world for eight of its subject areas. QS ranks the world's top 200 higher education institutions, and for this edition of the Rankings by Subject, 2,858 universities were evaluated and 678 institutions ranked in total.

UCT was ranked at 32 with regard to its Education and Training subject area. The other seven subject areas are: Earth and Marine Sciences, Politics, Psychology, Law and Legal Studies, History and Archaeology, Geography, and English Language and Literature. This year, UCT features in 19 of the 30 subject areas measured by QS. Three of UCT's subject areas, Agriculture, Civil Engineering and Politics, have also been rated for the first time.

Professor Danie Visser, deputy vice-chancellor for research, UCT, says: "The different world rankings of universities each measure different aspects of universities' performance. The methodology of the QS survey relies heavily on a global survey of what academics and employers think of a particular university (50%). One would expect that a university in the global south would not do particularly well in such surveys, since most of the respondents are probably from northern countries.

It is therefore most pleasing that UCT's work has registered sufficiently internationally to be placed in the top 100 in no fewer than eight areas and in the top 200 in 19 different areas."

The surveys are complemented by three other measures: the citations per faculty as indicated by SciVerse Scopus (20%), the staff-student ratio (20%) and the degree of internationalisation, measured by the proportion of international students (5%) and the proportion of international faculties (5%).

"Since UCT's research impact is above the world average in many areas and because we have a very good proportion of international students, these indicators would tend to boost our scores. As always, we are mindful that this is just one view of the cathedral, but we are very pleased about this renewed confirmation of the value of our work," says Professor Visser.