**Click here to discover the top South African universities in 2016.
With a much smaller population than the other four BRICS countries, South Africa has far fewer universities in its system. So while only 11 universities in South Africa are featured among this year’s 200 top BRICS universities, this is a reasonable representation considering the much smaller scope of its higher education sector.
The highest South African entrant is the University of Cape Town, which shares 9th place with Brazil’s Universidade Estadual de Campinas (“Unicamp”). The University of the Witwatersrand, Stellenbosch University and the University of Pretoria are also included within the BRICS top 50, while a further four South African universities are within the top 100.
While suggesting that, overall, universities in South Africa are performing at a level comparable to their counterparts in other BRICS countries, the ranking also confirms some of the relative strengths and weaknesses characterizing South African higher education.
For instance, South African universities’ weak scores in the indicators assessing academic staff levels reflect some of the concerns raised in a recent report from Higher Education South Africa (HESA). Meanwhile, internationalization is a much stronger area for universities in South Africa; the ranking illustrates how successful South African institutions have been in attracting academics from overseas, and also – to a slightly lesser extent – international students.
International reputation
The first two indicators used to compile the ranking are dedicated to assessing universities’ international reputation, based on major global surveys of academics and graduate employers. Here, universities in South Africa generally come out stronger among the first group. The University of Cape Town comes 10th in the academic survey, but is rated seven places lower by employers, while the University of The Witwatersrand comes 20th and 32nd respectively.
Exceptions to this general trend are the University of Pretoria, University of Johannesburg, University of the Free State and Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, all of which enjoy a stronger international reputation among graduate employers than within the academic community.
Academic staff
The two indicators assessing academic staff are both relatively weak points for universities in South Africa. No South African institution ranks within the top 100 for either faculty/student ratio (number of academic staff employed relative to students enrolled) or proportion of staff with a PhD, reflecting the country’s struggle to expand its faculty sizes and also to increase its postgraduate completion rates.
This last point was one of the major challenges highlighted by HESA’s recent report on the state of the country’s higher education system, which stated that only 34% of academics currently held a PhD, and that doctoral graduate rates were much lower than those claimed by countries such as Brazil.
Research
Despite relatively low levels of academics qualified to PhD level, universities in South Africa are among some of the strongest producers of research when compared to the other BRICS countries. The University of Cape Town is the overall BRICS leader for citations per paper, and is joined within the top 10 by the University of the Witwatersrand and Stellenbosch University. The University of the Western Cape, ranked 92nd overall, also comes out strong here, within the top 50 for research citations.
This strong research impact is coupled with relatively good research productivity, assessed by the number of papers published per faculty member. Eight South African universities are within the BRICS top 100 here, led by Rhodes University.
Internationalization
Internationalization is another strong area for universities in South Africa, certainly within the context of the BRICS group. The country claims three top-10 entries for proportion of international faculty: the University of Kwazulu-Natal comes second on this indicator, the University of The Witwatersrand fifth and the University of Cape Town seventh. The majority of South African universities featured in the ranking are also within the BRICS top 50 on this measure.
South African universities are almost, though not quite, as strong when it comes to proportion of international students. Here the highest scores go to Rhodes University (second) and the University of Cape Town (sixth), with the majority of South African universities again included within or just outside the BRICS top 50.