ALL three of the major and most respected international rankings of universities have now been released for 2014 — the Shanghai, the QS and the Times Higher Education evaluations. Once again, we did not perform well. Our top three universities are clearly the University of Cape Town, Wits and Stellenbosch and they are rightly proud of this. In spite of their modest budgets they manage to hold their own in the top 300, at least in one of the rankings. But the harsh truth is that only these three of our 25 universities appear consistently in the rankings at all. Local universities of which much is made, such as the Universities of Pretoria, Johannesburg, Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Rhodes barely appear at all, or if they do, it is largely below the 400 level…..more