UWI Ranks as 1 of the Best Universities in the World

There is good news for the hundreds of Belizeans studying at the University of the West Indies. That’s because it is in the top five percent of best universities in the world. The Times Higher Education World University Rankings published its list at the end of September ranking the world’s universities according to thirteen performance indicators underlying five metrics, including research, teaching, research influence, industry income and international outlook. U.W.I. was the only Caribbean university to make the list. U.W.I. held a press conference in Saint Lucia today where the Vice-Chancellor spoke on the university’s debut on the list at five hundred and ninety-one out of one thousand two hundred and fifty-eight universities placing the U.W.I. in the top five percentile. Here’s what Professor Hilary Beckles had to say on the achievement.

Hilary Beckles

Professor Hilary Beckles, Vice Chancellor, UWI

“We are number one in the Caribbean. In Latin America and the Caribbean an overall collective ranking of thirty-seven out of an overall of two thousand colleges and institutions in the Latin American and Caribbean space. And in the global rankings, in the over twenty-eight universities in the world, we are in the top five percent. Now, what is the significance of all of this? It is good to be at the top of an endeavor that you have pursued. We have pursued excellence as the University of the West Indies for seventy years. Seven decades of the collective effort of a Caribbean people. At a time when we were still in a colonial dispensation, we set out to build a fine university from 1948. We wanted to build a university that was excellent, ethical and importantly a people’s university, because a university was emerging from a circumstance of generic impoverishment of our people. But, we always knew that our Caribbean material poverty had nothing to do with our intellectual capacity.”