PRODUCING more impactful research and graduates with marketable skills are among the benefits that come with Universiti Malaya’s (UM) good showing in global varsity rankings, even as the system continues to be controversial.

The nation’s oldest university saw a 400% boost in international and industrial funding for research projects from 2013 to 2017, the same period when UM moved up the world rankings, said Vice-Chancellor Dr Abdul Rahim Hashim.

This also allowed UM to conduct more student exchanges, which help those from the B40 group – comprising 60% of its student population – gain critical soft skills, such as communication and problem-solving, preparing them for the labour market, he said.

Despite the new government wanting to break away from the practice of obsessing over rankings, Rahim said UM still sees the system as a useful tool to assess the ability to perform its core mission: to disseminate and create knowledge, and to produce capable graduates.

He acknowledged that ranking systems, such Times Higher Education (THE) and Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings (QS Rankings), have blind spots.

Not denying that these systems could be “gamed”, he said UM moved up “organically” and by investing heavily in research capacity and crafting better curricula to produce well-rounded students.

“We didn’t pay any consultant,” he said, referring to the dubious practice of hiring a firm linked to the QS Rankings to advise institutions on how to move up.

“The mission is straightforward: to disseminate knowledge to students, create new knowledge through research, and develop students with the proper values and attributes,” he told The Malaysian Insight in an interview at the UM campus in Kuala Lumpur.

“At the end of the day, someone will ask us, how effective are these (aims)? What are the metrics that you use to show that you are good?

“We have local assessments, but we choose to participate in international assessments. if we are not assessed using that, what are the alternatives? People will ask us, where are you vis-a-vis your peers, such as the National University of Singapore?

“The ranking system may not be perfect… but it has helped us.”

The ‘game’

In June last year, UM broke into the top 100 of the QS Rankings, which ranked 1,000 institutions in 85 countries. UM placed 87th, its best achievement since joining the assessment 15 years ago. In the previous year, it placed 114th.

In the same year, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) climbed to 184th spot, while Universiti Putra Malaysia placed 202nd.

On January 16, UM broke into the top 20 of the THE Emerging Economies University Rankings, placing 18th. The rankings rated 450 institutions in 43 countries dubbed “emerging economies” – a term used for middle- and upper-middle-income developing nations.

UM’s and UKM’s rise in the rankings reflected the former Barisan Nasional administration’s Education Blueprint 2015-2025, which “aimed to place one university in Asia’s top 25, two in the global top 100 and four in the global top 200” by 2025, as measured by the QS Rankings.

Although their achievements were generally well received by the education industry, critics, such as writer Richard Holmes, questioned the measurements used in the QS Rankings.

Holmes, who is part of the International Ranking Experts Group in Brussels, said the rankings weighed more on reputation surveys among academics rather than research paper citations.

A 2017 study by the Penang Institute found that the academic and employer reputation surveys of the QS Rankings were the most controversial of the system’s metrics, as they could be highly subjective and manipulated. The two surveys comprised 50% of the QS Rankings.

Last November, Education Minister Dr Maszlee Malik urged public universities not to be fixated on rankings at the expense of producing well-rounded graduates who are good citizens, compassionate towards the downtrodden and possess a high degree of integrity.

“When you don’t have integrity, problems like plagiarism and lecturers putting their names on students’ papers arise. There’s no point being highly ranked if our students treat those with disabilities or those who are different poorly,” he was reported as saying.

Reputation counts

UM’s Rahim said the rankings measurement of UM’s reputation is what allowed the university to increase research funding from foreign sources by 400% and made it a draw for scientists seeking collaboration.

“Local funding (for research) has decreased due to the government’s financial constraints. So, the alternative is to go overseas and to (approach) industries. International funding increased by 400% between 2013 and 2017.

“When people want to collaborate with you, they want to see who you are, where you are. So, the rankings help as a ‘first view’ because these people participate in the rankings as well.”

Currently, UM draws 80% of its research funding from government grants and 20% from industries and foreign institutions.

The target is to increase the proportion of non-government funding to 40%, said Rahim.

The rise in its global reputation has helped UM increase its strength in four research clusters: health and wellbeing, social advancement and happiness, nature-inspired technology and innovative industries, and sustainability sciences.

It has also aided UM finding good partners for its student-exchange programmes, where for a semester, a local student gets to live and study in another country, and a student from that country comes to Malaysia.

Rahim said the programmes are invaluable, helping build character and confidence in typically shy Malaysian students.

“You can see the difference in their skills when they come back. They are more independent, more confident, they express themselves better. This is because when you are in a foreign environment, you are forced to think for yourself, to solve problems by yourself.

“And for us to do this, we need collaborators, and we want to send our students to reputable universities. It’s a two-way process. When their students come here, they want to see who we are, what we do. So, the rankings help position you as a preferred university.”

Such character-building programmes are critical to narrow the skills gap between UM students from the B40 group and those from T20 families, he said.

T20 students usually have better soft skills because of the opportunities afforded to them.

“When B40 students start university, they have a skills gap with a T20 student. We want to significantly narrow that gap by the time both these students graduate.” – February 2, 2019.