Top 500 universities unveiled – and none is Nigerian!

No university in Nigeria made it to the top 500 universities in the 2016 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) released on Monday.

The ranking is released by ShanghaiRanking consultancy, which 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.”

Only four African universities made it to the list of the top universities in the world: University of Cape Town, Witwatersrand University, Cairo University and Stellenbosch University.

Harvard University was ranked as number one, and has been so for 14 years.

In fact, save for Oxford, ranked number seven, all top ten universities are American.

ETH Zurich, in 19th place, comes first in continental Europe. University of Tokyo sits at number 20 and is first in Asia.

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.”

This is also the first time for China and Singapore to have Top 100 universities in the world.

In total, 27 universities have made it into the Top 500 list for the first time.