The University of the Free State (UFS) is among 12 South African universities ranked among the top 1 000 in the world. This is according to the Times Higher Education (THE) world university rankings for 2023/’24, released on 27 September.
The UFS ranks between 801 and 1 000 on the report, and is one of the nine South African universities in the top 1 000. The university has three campuses in the Free State; two in Bloemfontein and one in Qwaqwa.
Ranked universities were assessed on their range of aspects across 18 performance indicators covering their core missions of teaching, research, knowledge transfer, and internationalisation.
Among the South African ranked institutions, the University of Cape Town (UCT) is the highest at 167th place and is the only one in the top 200 bracket, with four others in the top 500. The Stellenbosch University (SU) and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) are the second highest ranked in the 301 to 350 bracket, with the University of Johannesburg (UJ) as the country’s third highest ranked university in the 401 to 500 range.
The report showed that the UJ, based in Gauteng, improved significantly this year and is now in the 401 to 500 range, after finishing between 601 and 800 last year.
Other South African universities are the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), University of Pretoria (UP), North-West University (NWU), Durban University of Technology (DUT), University of South Africa (Unisa), University of Venda (Univen), and University of the Western Cape (UWC).
According to THE, South Africa’s strongest metrics are research productivity and influence, and international co-authorship. It outperforms the top 500 universities in the world in the international co-authorship metric.
“It’s great to see an African university in the top 200 of THE’s world university rankings for 2024. It is a great achievement and represents an important flagship for South Africa and the whole continent.
“However, the South African higher education sector faces numerous difficulties due to funding challenges. Universities are powerful drivers of social mobility, economic grown and international competitiveness, so they are worthy of public investment and public support. We are keen to work with African universities and governments across the continent to provide data and benchmarking to help support the sector with strategic insights,” said Phil Baty, chief global affairs officer of THE.
Topping the world ranking charts is the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom (UK). The country boasts three universities in the top ten, while America has seven in the top ten bracket. Universities from America ranked among the top are Stanford University (second), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (third), Harvard University (fourth), and the University of Cambridge (fifth).
