UI’s Frontline Status is Affirmed on the Global Stage

UI’s Frontline Status is Affirmed on the Global Stage.

The status of the University of Ibadan not just as the first university in Nigeria but the best has been affirmed by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), a higher education analyst that provides data, analytics and insight on the global higher education sector.

Its rankings rely on metrics such as academic and employer reputation, faculty, research citation counts, international students’ diversity, international research network, employment outcomes, and sustainability.

Only three Nigerian universities out of the 297 universities operating in the country made it to the list of the 2026 world university rankings released by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS). They are the University of Ibadan (UI), University of Lagos (UNILAG), and Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria.

University of Ibadan and University of Lagos were ranked between 1001 and 1200, both in 2025 and 2026, while Ahmadu Bello University was placed in the 1201–1400 band in the 2026 rankings, it had no available data for 2025.

The 2026 QS World University Rankings featured 1,501 institutions from 106 locations around the globe.

Alongside Nigeria, the ranking also featured names of universities from ten other countries in Africa. Egypt had twenty universities on the list, while South Africa had eleven, and Tunisia had four.

Ghana and Morocco had two universities, each on the list, while only one university, each from Kenya, Libya, Sudan, Uganda, and Ethiopia, made an appearance.