The North-West University (NWU) continues to shine in international rankings. The latest Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings by Subject place four of the NWU’s subject groups in the top 850 globally, with one of these featuring in the 301 to 350 ranking category. The subject groups are agriculture, environmental sciences, physics and medicine. QS published these rankings on 12 March 2025.
Although the NWU does not have a medical school yet, it offers subjects that fall within the medicine category. It is envisaged that the NWU Medical School will enrol students from 2028.
The 2025 QS World University Rankings by Subject ranked the NWU in the 301 to 350 category for agriculture and forestry. This subject group also featured in the same category in 2024. Environmental sciences and physics are in the 501 to 550 and 551 to 600 categories respectively. QS placed the NWU’s medicine subject group in the 701 to 850 category.
According to QS, this year’s QS World University Rankings by Subject are the rankings agency’s biggest yet, with more institutions ranked than ever before. In 2024, it included 1 559 institutions, ranked across 55 subjects in five broad subject areas. This year they added an additional 171 institutions.
QS used five indicators to determine a place on the rankings table. These were academic reputation; employer reputation; citations per paper; the h-index (measuring the stability of the impact and quality of the work published by the institutions’ scientists and scholars); and the International Research Network (IRN) (measuring the efficiency of establishing stable research collaborations in all the broad subject areas).
This is not the first time the NWU has excelled in the QS rankings. Since 2023 the NWU has consistently featured a subject in the top 400 ranking performance group.
According to Prof Linda du Plessis, deputy vice-chancellor for Teaching and Learning, the subject group rankings are international acknowledgment of the great work the NWU’s academics and researchers are doing.
To learn more about the NWU’s performance in the various international rankings, visit: https://www.nwu.ac.za/rankings, or to learn more about the QS World University Rankings by Subject, visit: https://www.topuniversities.com/subject-rankings.
