5 Philippine universities in Asia's top 300

MANILA, Philippines - The University of the Philippines (UP) remained the country's top university based on the latest rankings released by QS University Rankings: Asia, leading four other Philippine schools in the list of Asia's best universities.

The country's premier university ranked 63rd in the region, improving by four spots from last year. Ateneo de Manila University was the second highest Philippine university at 115th, although it dropped from 109th in 2013. The University of Santo Tomas came in third, jumping by nine places from last year to 141st this year. De La Salle University remained within the 151st-160th range while previously unranked Ateneo de Davao University entered the list at 251st-300th. The University of Southeastern Philippines, which ranked within the 251st-300th range last year, was no longer in the list.

The National University of Singapore topped the rankings, followed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, University of Hong Kong, Seoul National University and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

“The improvement in the scores can be attributed to our continuing efforts to increase funds and incentives for research, upgrading our facilities and laboratories, proving support for PhD and Master’s scholarships, recruiting faculty through the Balik-PhD Program and Visiting Professors Program, giving greater incentive for honor graduates to teach in UP, and pursuing internationalization,” UP President Alfredo Pascual said.

The rankings followed a methodology which used nine indicators that include academic reputation from global survey (30 percent), employer reputation from global survey (10 percent), papers per faculty (15 percent), citations per paper (15 percent), faculty student ratio (20 percent), proportion of international students (2.5 percent), proportion of international faculty (2.5 percent), proportion of inbound exchange students (2.5 percent) and proportion of outbound exchange students (2.5 percent).