The University of the Philippines rose 30 places to 65th in the 2020 Times Higher Education (THE) Asia University Rankings, further securing its position as one of the leading universities in the region. It is one of the five Southeast Asian institutions and the only university from the Philippines that figured in the top 100. A total of 489 institutions made it to the rankings.
UP has steadily moved forward in the rankings, from its 156th position in 2018 to 95th in 2019.
Its climb in the regional rankings reflects its dramatic progress in the THE World University Rankings, where it entered the top 500 for 2020 and was ranked 159th in citations or among the top 11 percent of research universities around the world.
The Asia University Rankings use the same 13 performance indicators of the World University Rankings but the weightings have been recalibrated according to the priorities and unique attributes of Asian institutions.
The indicators gauge institutional performance in teaching (25 percent), research (30 percent), citations (30 percent), international outlook (7.5 percent) and industry income (7.5 percent).
The national university’s overall score went up from 38.1 in 2019 to 44.5 in 2020. Its best score was still in citations, from 69.1 in 2019 to 86.9 this year. It also showed improvements in industry income (from 35.8 to 39.4), research (from 18.9 to 19.8) and teaching (from 24.2 to 26.9). UP, however, lost points in international outlook, scoring 37.9 from 39.5 last year.
A significant portion of the scores for teaching and research was drawn from the results of the annual academic reputation survey conducted between November 2018 and March 2019. Teaching also took into account staff-to-student ratio, doctorate-to-bachelor’s ratio, doctorates-awarded-to-academic staff ratio and institutional income while research included research income as well as research productivity or the number of papers published in the academic journals indexed by Elsevier’s Scopus database per scholar.
Citation score was sourced from bibliometric data provided by Elsevier. This covered more than 23,400 academic journals indexed by Elsevier’s Scopus database and all indexed publications between 2014 and 2018. Citations to these publications from 2014 to 2019 were likewise collected. Citations measure research influence.
International outlook considered international-to-domestic-student ratio, international-to-domestic-staff ratio and international collaboration. Industry income counted the research income an institution earned from industry, scaled against the number of academic staff it employed.
In February, London-based THE published the rankings for universities in emerging economies where UP made a 17-place leap to 70th.
