São Paulo – The University of São Paulo (USP) was named the 105th best university in the world by the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR), a consulting organization of the United Arab Emirates, which assessed 19,788 institutions from all over the world.
USP moved down to places from last year but is still the best-ranked institution in Ibero-America, which comprises countries where Spanish or Portuguese are predominant languages in the continent. The institution that ranked 1st was the University of Harvard, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Published since 2012, the ranking uses four indicators: quality of education, measured by the number of a university’s alumni who have won major academic distinctions relative to the university’s size (25%); alumni employment (25%); quality of faculty (10%); and research performance (40%).
Among these indicators, the Brazilian entity got its highest scores in research performance and quality of faculty. “Being among the top 0.6% universities in the world represents the recognition of our institutional efforts and gives us a major social visibility among our national and international peers, thus encouraging the academic interchange across all levels,” USP dean was quoted as saying in a news release.
In Brazil, after USP, the best-ranked universities were the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).
Among the Arab countries, the best-ranked institution was King Abdulaziz University of Saudi Arabia at 278th and Cairo University at 546th. The UAE ranked 945th with the Khalifa University.
Translated by Guilherme Miranda
