The nation’s premier university – the University of Ibadan (UI) and the University of Lagos (UNILAG) are ranked Nigeria’s best universities in the latest World University Rankings.



Both universities emerged the best according to the Times Higher Education (THE) ranking for 2023 published this week where they both shared the top spot with 401-500 ranking globally and first spot in Nigeria.
While the UI claimed 11th in the world’s 401-500th category, the University of Lagos clinched 24th place out of the 25 universities in the category.

Covenant University, the only private university that made the top 10 list comes behind both federal universities, and ranked between 601 and 800 globally.

Five countries made the ranking for the first time, all of them in Africa: Zambia, Namibia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Mauritius.
The top five universities in the world according to the release are: University of Oxford, United Kingdom, 1st; Harvard University, United States, 2nd; University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, 3rd; Stanford University, United States, 3rd; and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States, 5th.

The Times Higher Education (THE) is a British magazine that specialises in higher education worldwide. In its latest World University Rankings 2023, no university in Nigeria made the first 300 on the list.

According to the latest report, the 2023 ranking analysed over 121 million citations across more than 15.5 million research publications. Over 1,799 universities across 104 countries and regions of the world were included.

In addition, it also had survey responses from 40,000 scholars globally were analysed.


“Overall, we collected over 680,000 data points from more than 2,500 institutions that submitted data,” THE stated.