UP lone Philippine school in Asia-Pacific university rankings

MANILA, Philippines -  The University of the Philippines was the only Philippine higher education institution included in the first-ever Asia-Pacific university rankings released by London-based  data provider Times Higher Education (THE) on Tuesday.

UP lagged behind some of its Southeast Asian counterparts and ranked 200+ among the 241 educational institutions from Asia-Pacific region that were included in the list.

“THE has launched its first Asia-Pacific University Ranking 2017 to reflect the region’s growing strength in the higher education sector,” the organization said.

“(The rankings) analyzed universities across 38 nations in East Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania. The overall ranking features just over 200 universities from 13 different nations,” it added.

Leading the list is the National University of Singapore, followed by Peking University (China), University of Melbourne (Australia), Tsinghua University (China) and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore).

Completing the top 10 schools are the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Australian National University, University of Tokyo (Japan) and University of Queensland (Australia).

The ranking is based on 13 performance indicators grouped into five areas: teaching (the learning environment), research (volume, income and reputation), citations (research influence), international outlook (staff, students and research), and industry income (knowledge transfer).

Universities are excluded from the ranking if they do not teach undergraduates or if their research output amounted to fewer than 1,000 articles between 2011 and 2015, according to THE’s methodology.

They can also be excluded if 80 percent or more of their activity is exclusively in one of eight subject areas.

A list release in March by the same organization in March ranked UP at 201-250 among Top 300 universities in Asia. It was also the lone Philippine university in the said list.