IRNA - Iran's Minister of Science, Research and Technology, pointing to the status of universities in international rankings, emphasized that based on one of the rankings 23 of Iran universities and 18 other universities are among top 1000 universities in the world.

Mansour Qolami highlighted on Sunday that two or three of Iranian universities rank below 500, because Iran is a newcomer to the global ranking process as a general ranking of universities.

'We are very young in comparison with the world's major universities; they have 300-400 years of history, and we are younger than they are,' the official went on to say.

The minister of science added, 'We sometimes say that Tehran University, 80 or other universities have 100 years of history, but certainly our universities� ranking is mostly the result of the Islamic Revolution. We think that if there are a lot of universities, this is a good indicator, while now in great universities, the large numbers of students and professors increases the university's rank.

He explained about the attraction of the elite, �What is in our plans is to attract the Iranian elite from abroad. We should accept that there are attractions outside of the country despite the compassion and interest and dependence of most of the elites to Iran.�

�We should be able to neutralize these attractions; in this context, we have about 150 collaborative projects with universities abroad, which our PhD professors do with foreign professors and researchers,' the minister added.