Rabat – Mohammed V University in Rabat, the sole representative of Moroccan higher education in the 2023 QS World University Rankings, was the least well ranked among Arab universities featured in the global ranking.
The Moroccan university saw a sharp drop in its global ranking from 1201+ in 2022 to 1401+ in the 2023 edition, well behind the University of Damascus in Syria.
Mohammed V University on Wednesday featured in the “world’s most-consulted international university rankings” along with 74 Arab universities. 13 of the Arab universities featured universities in the QS World Rankings experienced a decline in their placement while 19 others improved their rankings.
Commenting on the ranking, Ben Sowter, Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) Senior Vice President, said that “the Arab Region countries continue to assert themselves and their universities on the global stage.”
He added that “this year’s rankings shine a light on more Arabic institutions than ever before, allowing students, faculty, and policymakers to benchmark success, both regionally and globally.”
For this year, QS recorded its largest study so far by collecting data from 1418 institutions across 100 countries, marking a 1300 increase in the number of represented universities.
The 2023 edition also introduced two new indicators — employment outcomes for alumni and an international research network for research collaboration.
The other indicators include academic and employer reputation, citation per faculty, faculty/student ratio, international faculty ratio, and international student ratio. The main aim of such indicators is to evaluate universities’ internationalization efforts, as well as their academic performance and their students’ learning experience.
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The QS report established that the Arab region notably has one of the world’s highest international faculty ratios with nine out of the world’s top 10 institutions in this metric based in the UAE and the remaining university located in Kuwait.
The region is also home to five of the world’s top-10 universities with the highest international student ratio. Four of them are in the UAE while Saudi Arabia’s Islamic University of Madinah ranked first worldwide in this category.
Meanwhile, Egyptian universities topped this year’s QS regional ranking with 14 entries, including the American University in Cairo (AUC) which ranked 416th worldwide. The AUC is notably the only university from an Arab-speaking country on the African continent to be placed in the world’s top 500 universities.
Globally, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) once again topped the global ranking for the eleventh consecutive month ahead of the University of Cambridge which has risen to second place, and Stanford University which remains in the third position.
The low placement and absence of Moroccan universities in the global and regional rankings echo most Moroccans’ concerns about the quality of national education.
As the Moroccan government promotes reforms for a more innovative and English-driven K-12 and higher education, Morocco continues to record low in different indicators set by the QS ranking.
