UNIVERSITI Malaya has moved up a few notches in the QS world ranking of universities, while Singapore’s top two universities continue to sparkle on the world stage.

Although Malaysia has five public universities among the top 300 in the 2018 QS World University Rankings, this pales in comparison with Singapore’s institutions of higher learning.

Malaysia’s best, UM made the 114th spot, but Singapore’s Nanyang Technology University took the 11th spot, followed by the National University of Singapore at 15th.

The other four Malaysian varsities trailed far behind – Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) at the 229th spot, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), 230th; Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), 253rd; and Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), 264th.

All had improved their rankings from last year. UM was 133rd, UPM was 270th, UTM was 288th, UKM was 302nd and USM was 330th.

QS Intelligence Unit head Ben Sowter said Malaysian universities were improving their academic and employer reputation scores.

The latest rankings, its 14th edition, were announced on Tuesday on the topuniversities.com website.

The QS World University Rankings is published annually to provide an index of the world’s leading higher education institutions, based on six indicators – academic and employer reputation, student-to-faculty ratio, research citations per faculty member, proportion of international faculty, and proportion of international students.

The ranking has been expanded this year to feature 959 universities – 43 more than last year – in 84 countries. 

For six years straight now, US’ Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has topped the rankings.

Three other American universities join MIT in the top 10 – Stanford (2nd), Harvard (3rd) and the California Institute of Technology or Caltech (4th). In 9th place is the University of Chicago.

In 5th place is United Kingdom’s Cambridge University. UK’s other top schools are Oxford, the University College of London and Imperial College London at 6th, 7th and 8th respectively.

Making the 10th spot is Switzerland’s tech and science university, the ETH Zurich - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

The rankings this year also showed Chinese universities making “big advances”, earning top 100 spots for the first time.

Among them were Tsinghua University (25th), Peking University (38th), Fudan University (40th), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (62nd), Zhejiang University (87th) and the University of Science and Technology of China (97th). – June 8, 2017.