Top 500 University: Again, Harvard Tops The Chart, Nigerian Schools Miss Out

Harvard University has once again been ranked at the top of the top 500 universities in the 2016 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), making it the first university for the fourteenth year running.

The list which was released on Tuesday by China’s ShanghaiRanking Consultancy, in Shanghai, showed that all the top 10 universities for 2015 retained their place in the top 10 this year.

According to the ranking, all top ten universities are in the United States of America, apart from Oxford University located in the United Kingdom.

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ShanghaiRanking consultancy uses “transparent methodology and third-party data”.

The methods include “the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of Highly Cited Researchers, the number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science, the number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index – Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and per capita performance.”

ETH Zurich, in 19th place, comes first in continental Europe. University of Tokyo sits at number 20 and is first in Asia, with no African university making the top 100.

Only four African universities made it to the list – University of Cape Town, Witwatersrand University, Cairo University and Stellenbosch University.

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Wits took the top position in Africa, placed in the top 200 in the world in the field of Social Sciences.

The first 20 top universities on the ranking lists include Harvard University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Cambridge, one of the oldest universities in the world, founded in 1209, Princeton University, University of Oxford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology, Columbia University and University of Chicago.

Others include, Yale University, University of California, Los Angeles, Cornell University, University of California, San Diego, University of Washington, John Hopkins University, University College London, University of Pennsylvania, ETH Zurich, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, and University of Tokyo.

According to ShanghaiRanking consultancy, there are “totally 9 universities breaking into the Top 100 list in 2016, among which Tsinghua University, Peking University, Monash University, National University of Singapore, Mayo Medical School and the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center make their first appearance in the Top 100.”

Also, for the first time ever, China and Singapore universities were ranked among the Top 100 universities in the world.

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The ARWU has been published annually since 2013 by ShanghaiRanking Consultancy.

It provides a different view of the best universities in the world to the Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings 2016 which ranks 800 universities.

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