Are Malaysian varsities consigned to mediocrity?

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 3 — For the third year straight, not a single Malaysian university was featured in a world chart of the top 400 tertiary institutions released today while those in neighbouring Thailand and Singapore continued to soar.

The Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings 2013-14 were dominated by the US, with 77 universities in the top 200, followed by the UK with 31 universities.

Meanwhile, two universities in Singapore, the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NUT), were not only featured in the top 200, but have improved their rankings since last year.

NTU moved up from 86^th to 76^th, while NUS moved up from 29^th place to 26^th making it the second best university in the Asia-Pacific region.

Thailand’s King Mongkut’s University of Technology rose from the 351-400 band last year into the 301-350.

None of the universities from neighbouring Indonesia and the Philippines made the cut either.

California Institute of Technology (Caltech) was ranked world number one spot for the third consecutive year, while Harvard University and Oxford University shared second place, pushing Stanford University into fourth.

The THE rankings assess a university’s strengths using 13 indicators measuring its teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.

It is the world’s largest academic reputation survey involving over 10,000 academics, and is powered by intelligence firm Thomson Reuters, which independently collects, analyses and verifies the data.

This comes as another recent survey, the QS World University Rankings recently showed that the rankings of Malaysian public universities generally continued to drop with only the Universiti Malaya (UM) remaining in the group of 200 top universities in the world this year.

Only seven Malaysian universities are in the group of 800, and only Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) showed a slight improvement from the 358^th position in 2012 to 355^th this year. 

UM vice-chancellor Tan Sri Dr Ghauth Jasmon and Education Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin had defended the varsity’s rankings last month, saying that fluctuating world ranking for a university is normal. 

According to Ghauth, UM’s ranking fell because the number of evaluators increased by 35 per cent, with a majority of them unfamiliar with universities in the Asia Pacific region.

Former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad had also claimed last week that Malaysian universities have constantly lagged behind in global rankings due to the lack of quality educators here caused by Malaysia’s over-zealousness in building tertiary institutions.