Only three Nigerian universities made it to the list of the 2026 world university rankings released by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) on Thursday, and none was in the top 1,000.

Quacquarelli Symonds is 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.

The Nigerian institutions that made it to the ranking out of the 297 universities operating in the country are the University of Ibadan (UI), University of Lagos (UNILAG) and Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria.

There are 297 universities in Nigeria according to data obtained from the National Universities Commission (NUC).

Checks showed that UI and UNILAG were ranked between 1001 and 1200, both in 2025 and 2026. While ABU 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 20 universities on the list, while South Africa had 11 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.

Meanwhile, the two African universities that made it to the top 300 in the 2026 rankings are the University of Cape Town and the University of The Witwatersrand, both in South Africa. The former was ranked 150, while the latter was ranked 291.

The top 10 in the rankings are Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US; Imperial College London, UK; Stanford University, US; University of Oxford, UK; Harvard University, US; University of Cambridge, UK; ETH Zurich, Switzerland; National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore; University College London (UCL), UK; and California Institute of Technology (Caltech), US. (FIJ, excluding headline)

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