The University of Johannesburg (UJ) has retained its global spot among the world’s top universities with its inclusion in the 2018/19 edition of the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR), which were released on Monday, 28 May 2018.
Says Prof Tshilidzi Marwala, the Vice-Chancellor and Principal, UJ: “The University has progressively climbed the CWUR World University Rankings in comparison to its current global ranking of 790. This constitutes an impressive and phenomenal climb of 161 places from last year’s debut rank position of 951 in the 2017 CWUR Rankings. The ranking confirms that our strategic focus on accessible global excellence and stature is bearing fruit, a continuing focus of UJ over the next decade. This latest CWUR ranking placement also sees UJ remaining in firm sixth position in South Africa. This sanctions UJ’s evolution into a pan-African epicenter of critical intellectual enquiry and scholarship.”
Since 2012, the CWUR World University Rankings independently measure a university’s quality of education and training of students, as well as the prestige of their academic staff members and the quality of their research without relying on reputational surveys and university data submissions. For the 2018/19 edition of the CWUR Rankings, 18 000 higher education institutions were evaluated, among which only the best 1 000 research-intensive universities received a ranking.
These rankings, which started out as a project in Saudi Arabia rating only the top 100 universities in the world, quickly expanded in 2014 to list the top 1 000 out of 18 000 universities worldwide, making them the largest academic rankings of global universities. In 2016, the CWUR headquarters moved to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
CWUR employs seven performance indicators in its assessment and ranking of the world’s top universities, namely: Quality of Education (15%), Alumni Employment (15%), Quality of Faculty (15%), Research Output (15%), Quality of Publications (15%), Research Influence (15%), and Citations (10%). The methodology has been amended considerably this year with the bulk, 70%, of the total score dedicated to research-related factors. As such, this year’s rankings tend to favour research-driven universities devoted to producing exceptional world-class research.
