By Janvic Mateo
The Philippine Star-Sept 28
The University of the Philippines has continued to improve its rating, while De La Salle University (DLSU) has entered for the first time the world university rankings of London-based Times Higher Education (THE).
UP, the country’s only national university, climbed to the 501st-600th bracket in the latest ranking, improving from 601st-800th and 800+ ranks in the lists released last year and in 2016, respectively. Meanwhile, DLSU entered the list ranked in the 801st-1,000th spot.
The new ranking is based on 13 performance indicators grouped into five areas: teaching, which pertains to the learning environment, research (volume, income and reputation), citations (research influence), industry income (knowledge transfer) and international outlook (staff, students and research).
Based on the results released yesterday, UP scored 21.7 percent in teaching, 16 percent in research, 69.1 percent in citations, 35.8 percent in industry income and 39.5 percent in international outlook.
Meanwhile, DLSU scored 16.7 percent in teaching, 10.8 percent in research, 28.4 percent in citations, 34 percent in industry income and 33.7 percent in international outlook. They said over 1,250 universities from 86 countries were represented in this year’s list.
For the third consecutive year, the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom topped the list. The University of Cambridge, also in the UK, maintained its hold on second place.
Following them are United States-based institutions Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Princeton University and Yale University. Completing the top 10 are the Imperial College London in the UK and the University of Chicago in the US.
China’s Tsinghua University led the universities from Asia, ranking 22nd and overtaking National University of Singapore (NUS), which dropped to 23rd spot.
“It is the first time that a Chinese university has topped Asia’s representatives under the current methodology of the world rankings (since 2011). The NUS led the continent between 2016 and 2018, while the University of Tokyo was pre-eminent between 2011 and 2015,” THE said.
“Over the past year, Tsinghua has improved its citation impact, increased its institutional income and grown its international outlook, with greater shares of international staff, students and co-authored publications,” it added.
Among tertiary institutions in Southeast Asia, only the NUS, the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (51st) and the University of Malaya in Malaysia (301st-350th) ranked higher than UP.
