DESPITE IMPROVING in its global standing by 677 places, the University of Santo Tomas remained the country’s fourth-best school in the 2026 EduRank rankings.
UST ranked 1,951st out of 14,131 universities worldwide in the recent assessment, a leap from its 2,628th place in 2025. However, it has retained its national position for four consecutive years since 2023.
The ranking agency evaluated a total of 229 educational institutions in the country. The University of the Philippines (UP) was still the top university nationwide, ranking 1,299th in the world. It was followed by De La Salle University (1,569th) and Ateneo de Manila University (1,731st).
UST managed to stay ahead of other local universities, including UP Los Baños (2,422nd), UP Manila (2,462nd), Mapua University (3,792nd) and University of San Carlos (3,870th).
Other Philippine universities covered by the assessment include the Asian Institute of Management (4,581st), Silliman University (4,625th), Polytechnic University of the Philippines (4,898th) and Mindanao State University (5,116th).
According to the EduRank, the University was assessed based on its research output, which the ranking agency noted was composed of 4,649 academic publications and 56,509 citations, non-academic reputation and impact of 237 “notable alumni.”
Biology continued to be UST’s leading subject in terms of research output at 2,674 publications and 40,622 citations. The University also stayed at fifth place in the subject’s topical rankings in the Philippines.
UST also retained its national rankings in the following subjects: third in psychology; fourth in mathematics, medicine, business, and arts and design; fifth in liberal arts and social sciences; sixth in environmental science and chemistry; and seventh in computer science, engineering, economics and physics.
EduRank’s overall ranking is based on three components: research performance, based on publications and citations from OpenAlex, with weights adjusted for publication date and author contribution (45%); non-academic prominence, measured by backlinks from other websites (45%); and alumni score, showing the total Wikipedia page views of a university’s graduates and affiliated individuals across all 43 language versions (10%).
Harvard University remained the global top institution in the assessment, followed by Stanford University and the University of Oxford in London.
The EduRank is an independent, metric-based ranking agency that uses a database of scholarly publications and citations to evaluate 14,131 universities across 183 countries. F
