Cameroonian universities absent on list of world’s top 1,799 universities

By Hans Ngala

Times Higher Education, the world’s most respected university ranking organization, has released its global 2023 university rankings and not a single Cameroonian university is on the list.

Times Higher Education published its 2023 rankings on 12 October 2023 and although a good number of African countries joined the list for the first time, Cameroon was not one of them.
According to Times’ 2023 list, the top three African universities are the University of Cape Town (UCT), Stellenbosch University and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), all in South Africa.

Times’ stated that their table is based on 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators that measure an institution’s performance across four areas: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.

This year’s ranking analysed over 121 million citations across more than 15.5 million research publications and included survey responses from 40,000 scholars globally.
UCT’s strongest performance was in citations — or research influence — which measures the number of times a piece of research is cited. In this area, the university ranked 172nd globally.

In research — volume, income and reputation — UCT also ranked in the top 200 globally. The university’s performance improved for two indicators: the research reputation survey and the ratio of papers to academic staff.

UCT’s scores increased in four of the five indicators for teaching (the learning environment): the teaching reputation survey, the ratio for doctorate degrees awarded to academic staff, the ratio of students to academic staff and the ratio of institutional income to academic staff. UCT’s score in the fifth indicator — ratio of doctorates to bachelor’s degrees awarded — dropped only slightly, by 0.1 points.

Simply put, the list ranks universities based on the quality of research produced by academic staff of an institution and how many times that university’s research gets cited by others while other factors such as the university’s facilities or campus are also considered.
Cameroon’s University of Buea and University of Bamenda probably have the strictest admissions policy of Cameroonian universities, while the University of Yaounde due to its longevity would be expected to have more research volume but none of them made the list.

Oxford University remained the best university in the world for the seventh consecutive year, followed by Harvard University in the US while the third spot was shared by three universities: University of Cambridge, Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Harvard tops the teaching pillar, while Oxford leads the research pillar. Atop the international pillar is the Macau University of Science and Technology.