The University of Pretoria (UP) is pleased to announce that it has maintained its position as fourth among the South African universities ranked in the 2016 Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) University rankings – a position it held in the 2014 and 2015 rankings.

The QS World University Rankings assess universities in four broad areas, namely teaching, research, employability and international outlook. Six indicators are used for each area: academic reputation, faculty–student ratio, citations per faculty, employer reputation, international student ratio and international staff ratio. Up to 50% of the weighting is based on academic reputation based on surveys done over five years.

UP is pleased that it has been ranked highly in the areas of academic and employer reputation, taking second position among South African universities on the latter. Similarly, there is considerable improvement in the University's performance with regard to the number of academic articles and citations. The global impact of UP's research output is growing.

The 2016 QS University Rankings results are a strong indication that UP is on track to achieve its strategic objective of becoming an internationally recognised, research-intensive university in Africa.