5 Philippine universities among Asia's best

MANILA, Philippines - Five schools from the Philippines made it to the list of top 300 universities in Asia, a report released Monday by QS University Rankings: Asia showed.

The University of the Philippines (UP) was the lone Philippine university in the top 100, ranking 67th in the list. UP was followed by the Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU) at 109th, University of Santo Tomas (UST) at 150th, De La Salle University (DLSU) at 151st-160th and University of Southeastern Philippines (USP) at 251st-300th.

UP improved by a notch from last year's 68th place. ADMU slid from 86th place, along with DLSU from 142nd place. UST similarly dropped from 148th place, although it has overtaken DLSU in the rankings this year. USP's ranking, meanwhile, remained unchanged.

The 22-year-old Hong Kong University of Science and Technology topped this year's list, followed by the National University of Singapore, University of Hong Kong, Seoul National University and Peking University.

The regional ranking of Asian universities, now on its fifth edition, followed a methodology which used nine indicators, QS said. These are academic reputation from global survey (30 percent), employer reputation from global survey (10 percent), papers per faculty (15 percent), citations per paper (15 percent), faculty student ratio (20 percent), proportion of international students (2.5 percent), proportion of international faculty (2.5 percent), proportion of inbound exchange students (2.5 percent) and proportion of outbound exchange students (2.5 percent).