KUALA LUMPUR, March 12 — No Malaysian university made it to the Times Higher Education (THE) World Reputation Rankings that surveyed 142 countries this year.

In fact, no Malaysian university has appeared in the list of 100 universities since the THE started its Reputational Rankings in 2011.

This is because too few scholars cite Malaysia’s universities as being the best in the largest survey of leading academics worldwide.

When asked why this was the case, Fran Langdon, a representative for THE, told Malay Mail Online that she thought it was because not many Malaysian universities participate in international rankings and share their data.

“It’s speculative, but this might be because Malaysian universities don’t often collaborate with many foreign institutions, they don’t attract many international students, and they don’t publish many papers in English,” she said.

The survey asked academics to nominate no more than 10 of the best institutions in their narrow field of expertise.

The survey was available in 15 languages and distributed based on United Nations data to reflect the global distribution of scholars.

Phil Baty, the editor of the THE Reputation Rankings said that while they were based “purely on subjective judgement,” they represented “the expert subjective judgment of those who know most about excellent teaching and research — leading academics from all around the world.”

“A university’s global academic reputation is vital,” he said.

“[It] not only influences investments and funding decisions, but more importantly, it helps a university to develop and nurture its single greatest asset: its student and academic talent.”

Second Education Minister Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh claimed in February that the country’s higher education system is now on par with that of advanced countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia in terms of quality of education.

This claim was heavily derided by opposition figures.

Two Singapore universities made it to the list which saw Harvard retain its top spot, with the UK’s Cambridge and Oxford universities holding second and third place, respectively, pushing out the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (now 4th) and Stanford (now 5th).

The rest of the top 10 spots were held by American universities such as Berkeley, Yale, and Columbia.

Tokyo University in Japan was the highest-ranked Asian university at 12th place, followed by the National University of Singapore (NUS), which dropped three places to 24th, and China’s Tsinghua University at 26th.

Other Asian universities in the top 100 include the University of Hong Kong, Seoul National University, and National Taiwan University.

Overall, the top country in terms of rankings was the US, which had 43 universities in the top 100, followed by the UK with 12, and Germany with six. The top Asian country was China, which had four (including those in Hong Kong). The cities with the highest number of universities on the list were London and Paris.

The rankings are based on 9,794 responses from a total of 10,507 responses from 142 countries to the THE survey.