UNIVERSITI Malaya (UM), which scored 24th place in the 2018 Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) university rankings for Asia, has moved up 11 spots since it first appeared in the rankings in 2012, the country’s top university said today.

UM is the only Malaysian varsity to make it into the top 25 universities in Asia in the ranking published by QS, a London-based education consultancy. In the 2017 rankings, UM came 27th in Asia.

“The rankings place UM in the top 24 in Asia, and this makes it the top university in the nation,” UM acting vice-chancellor Professor Dr Awang Bulgiba Awg Mahmud said in a statement.

According to QS, UM is within the top 1% of approximately 11,900 universities in Asia, he added.

The top two positions in Asia were taken by Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and the National University of Singapore in the ranking released yesterday.

The remaining spots in the top 25 were dominated by universities from China (6), South Korea (6), Japan (5) and Hong Kong (4) and Taiwan (1).  

Indicators used in the QS Asia University Rankings 2018 include academic reputation (30%), employer reputation (20%), faculty/student ratio (15%), citations per paper (10%), papers per faculty (10%), staff with PhD (5%), proportion of international faculty, international students, inbound and outbound exchange students (each 2.5%).

Awang said UM achieved better scores in all the indicators except for the ratio of international staff.

He said the university’s better performance this year is due to the improvement in its reputation among the academic fraternity as well as employers, and its research, both in terms of output and impact.

“While this may be celebrated, the university is mindful that the results also show that UM has lost some grounds in its regional competitiveness in attracting international students and staff, and to maintain an ideal faculty student ratio such that the quality of teaching and graduate supervision is not compromised,” he said.

He added that the current economic condition demands the university to find new sources of funding and venture into income-generating activities to support itself.

Meanwhile, four other Malaysian public universities also made it into the top 50 universities in the QS Asia University Rankings 2018.

Universiti Putra Malaysia was placed 36th with Japan’s Keio University CEMS MIM and Taiwan’s National Chiao Tung University.

Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Universiti Sains Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia were ranked at 43th, 46th and 49th respectively.

Other Malaysian universities in the top 200 in this latest QS ranking include Universiti Teknologi Petronas (101th), Universiti Utara Malaysia (131th), Taylor’s University (150th), Universiti Teknologi Mara (158th), International Islamic University Malaysia (163th) and Multimedia University (179th).

QS is a tertiary education and career advice consultancy firm that organises education events, tours for prospective students and publishes tertiary education guides. 

It started publishing a ranking of the world’s universities in 2004 with London-based publisher Times Higher Education. 

Times Higher Education separated from QS to publish the Times Higher Education World University Ranking jointly with Thomson Reuters in 2010.

A UK independent education think-tank Higher Education Policy Institute said in a 2016 report that indicators of such international rankings are skewed towards measuring a university’s research performance and may not necessarily reflect its teaching quality.

While acknowledging the rankings’ benefit for prospective students, the think-tank advised governments and universities worldwide against using these rankings as a sole measure of an institution’s quality and excellence. – October 17, 2017.