Johannesburg – The North-West University has been ranked the safest university in South Africa in a worldwide survey conducted by education and technology platform StuDocu.
South African universities, which were included for the first time in the StuDocu World University Ranking, fared much better in terms of safety than those in the Netherlands and Belgium.
The StuDocu World University Ranking shows how students perceive and experience their university’s efforts and performance on a number of topics.
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If a university ranks high on safety this means students feel their university takes the right safety measures to ensure they feel safe on campus. StuDocu CEO and co-founder Marnix Broer said there were currently about 15-million students from 2 000 universities across 60 countries who were using StuDocu to access high-quality materials every month.
He said that the world ranking was based on the opinion and experience of 100 000 students and recent graduates from nearly 1 800 universities from 30 countries collected from July 21 to August 10.
“Each university is ranked by current or recently graduated students on a variety of categories, utilising a scale of one to 10, as well as their likelihood to recommend their school to family and friends,” said Broer.
A total of 24 South African universities were ranked based on 16 categories that directly impact students and how they experience life on campus.
“On safety, the question was: ‘Does your university take the right safety measures to ensure you feel safe on campus’? “Perhaps it can differ per person as to what makes them feel safe, but we measure if what they need to feel safe has been taken care of by the university. The answers were anonymised, but in general the gender distribution on our platform is almost 50/50.”
The North-West University came tops with a safety ranking of 9.4. The University of Pretoria, University of Johannesburg, Durban University of Technology and Varsity College were a close second, all notching up a safety ranking of 9.2.
University of Zululand received the lowest score of 7.
“These positive rankings are a breath of fresh air, especially when compared to the country’s latest crime statistics, which revealed that during the first three months of 2021 murder and attempted murder recorded an increase of 8.4% and 8.7%, respectively.
“We are very excited to have been able to include South Africa in our StuDocu World University Ranking this year,” said Broer.
He said South Africa’s safety ratings compare very favourably and are even higher than some countries. Broer added that the StuDocu World University Ranking 2021 was one of the only rankings that highlighted the student experience from the inside, with rankings that showcase current student sentiment.
He said they would look into the idea of adding content and emergency contact details of various organisations to the platform that could assist should a student feel unsafe.
He said the platform was founded in 2013 by four students to exchange study documents and that millions of study documents have been shared and are accessible to everyone in the world for free.
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