On the 2023 THE world university rankings

By Joshua Corcuera

The 2023 World University Rankings by Times Higher Education (THE) was released about a week ago. In the list are several learning institutions from the country and some notable observations.

Rankings

Based on the rankings, the Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU) is the most prestigious school in the Philippines. The Ateneo ranked 351-400 and the University of the Philippines (UP) is a distant second with a global rank of 801-1000. Only two Philippine universities made it to the top 1,000 schools around the world.

Meanwhile, the De La Salle University (DLSU) is the third most prominent school in the country while it ranked 1201-1500 globally. Finally, Mapua University completed the list with its global rank of 1501+.

As to the methodology, there are five performance indicators for this year’s rankings: (1) teaching, (2) research, (3) citations, (4) international outlook, and (5) industry income. Teaching, research, and citations each constitute 30% of the scoring while international outlook constitutes 7.5% and the remaining 2.5% belongs to industry income. Some of these indicators have an even further breakdown which, though I would not mention further in this article, is accessible on the website of THE.

When it comes to scores, ADMU garnered an overall score of 45.0 – 46.9 with a near perfect score of 97.0 when it comes to citations. UP had an overall score of 29.8 – 33.9 and managed to overcome the Ateneo in three performance indicators, namely (1) research, (2) industry income, and (3) international outlook. Despite this, the Ateneo scored so high in citations which possibly explains its better performance against UP for this year. The state-run university scored 62.5 in citations and 21.4 in teaching, while the Ateneo scored 32.4 in teaching, the highest in the list.

New Big Four?

One thing immediately came to mind, not only to me, but also to many students who voiced their thoughts in social media: the University of Santo Tomas (UST) is a reporter university. According to THE, “Universities with reporter status will therefore be visible in a way that they weren’t previously, and we will feed back to those universities where they failed to meet the criteria to help them as they work towards admission to future rankings.”

Basically, reporter universities participated but ended up unranked. Many claimed that the traditional Big Four—UP, ADMU, DLSU, and UST—is no more because UST has been replaced by Mapua. It makes sense because, after all, there are only 4 ranked schools in the Philippines—ADMU, UP, DLSU, and Mapua.

However, readers of the rankings must remember that in the previous edition of the THE rankings, the Ateneo also attained a reporter status. This year, however, it jumped to be the top Philippine school. With this in mind, it is possible that UST would be ranked next year and may surmount Mapua, and maybe even the current top three schools.

Aside from UST, there are 5 other reporter schools from the Philippines included in the list: Cebu Technological University, Mindanao State University – Iligan Institute of Technology, University of Science and Technology of Southern Philippines, Tarlac Agricultural University, and Visayas State University.