MAY 4 — Malaysia has just launched a new 10-year national education blueprint 2026-2035. Many have lauded the ambitious nature of the plan. Equally, many have warned about the many challenges of implementation. Malaysia’s ambition to become a global education hub is both laudable and logical. With a strong multilingual base, strategic location, and decades of investment in campus infrastructure, the foundation is solid.
The visible presence of Malaysian universities in international rankings, driven by a concerted push for publications, proves the strategy has momentum. However, in today’s hyper-competitive arena, where rankings increasingly value the impact and relevance of research, a simple “publish or perish” treadmill is no longer enough. To rise decisively, Malaysian universities must strategically pivot from quantity to quality, and from visibility to genuine global influence.
The first, and most critical, shift must be in the culture of publication itself. The current incentive system at many institutions often rewards quantity and journal prestige points (e.g., Q1 journals) above all else. This has yielded growth, but risks creating a factory-like output of incremental studies with limited resonance. The new strategy must incentivise research ambition and rigour.
This means providing protected time, seed funding for high-risk/high-reward ideas, and celebrating papers not just for where they are published, but for their citation impact, policy influence, or public engagement. Universities should actively foster interdisciplinary research clusters — mixing engineers with economists, medical researchers with data scientists — to solve complex problems. This is where groundbreaking science often happens.
This leads directly to the second pillar: authentically embedding the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into the research DNA. SDG alignment is not a branding exercise; it is a powerful framework for relevance. Malaysian universities are uniquely positioned to lead on SDG research that speaks to both local and global challenges. Think of pioneering work on sustainable palm oil alternatives, climate-resilient urban planning for tropical megacities, equitable healthcare models for ageing societies, or biodiversity conservation in Asean rainforests.
This requires moving beyond tagging existing projects with SDG keywords. It demands strategic hiring, creating SDG-focused research institutes, and aligning postgraduate programmes to train the problem-solvers of tomorrow. Research on local issues with global parallels will attract international scholarly attention and partnerships organically.
Speaking of partnerships, the third pillar requires transforming international collaboration from a transactional metric to a transformational engine. The goal should not be to simply add foreign co-authors to papers. The strategy must be to build deep, equitable consortiums around shared challenges. Malaysian universities should position themselves as indispensable hubs for research in the Global South and on tropical themes.
Pursue joint PhD programmes, co-supervision networks, and shared laboratory access with top universities worldwide. Crucially, they must also become better at telling the story of their research. A powerful publication in a specialist journal is just the start. Investing in science communication, policy briefs, and media engagement to translate findings for public and government consumption amplifies impact — a factor rankings are increasingly attuned to.
Furthermore, universities must empower their greatest asset: their academics. The academics must be suitably empowered to bring change. This means reducing excessive administrative burdens, streamlining ethics approval processes, and providing robust grant-writing support. Simultaneously, they must be ruthless in upgrading critical infrastructure — not just labs, but high-speed computational resources and open-access publishing funds. Most important is the art of people management, especially how to effectively motivate them.
The race up the ranking ladder is not won by playing a short-term game. It is won by building a vibrant, confident, and impactful research ecosystem. For Malaysia, the opportunity is not merely to appear in the rankings, but to redefine what excellence from a non-Western hub looks like: excellence that is scientifically rigorous, globally connected, and passionately relevant to humanity’s pressing needs. The rankings are a symptom of health, not the cause.
By strategically focusing on quality, SDG-led relevance, and deep partnerships, Malaysian universities will not just climb the ladder — they will help build a new one. If universities can embrace such path, that would effectively silenced the growing critics of the ranking investment.
* Professor Datuk Ahmad Ibrahim is affiliated with the Tan Sri Omar Centre for STI Policy Studies at UCSI University and is an Adjunct Professor at the Ungku Aziz Centre for Development Studies, Universiti Malaya. He can be reached at ahmadibrahim@ucsiuniversity.edu.my
** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
