Quality of Malaysian Universities

It is again the time of the year, where Times Higher Education Supplement would be releasing the list of top 200 Universities around the world. While the ranking is not the only measure of a university's quality, I would say that many people do look seriously and deeply into it. The prestige of universities could be enhanced or degraded due to it.

This year's list would be released on 9th November, which is the day after Deepavali. What do you think our local IPTAs would fare? Would there be more than 2 Malaysian Universities making it to top 200? Last year, UKM was ranked 185 and UM was ranked 192 (unless my memory is wrong). Could we penetrate the top 150 ranking? Could more of our universities make the mark? USM? MMU? UPM? or any other universities?

Talking about university benchmark, guess we should look at how should we measure a university? Times measure include peer institution review, recruiters' review, student:faculty ratio, international faculty, international students, citations. Are these the most important thing?

Recently, an Academic Reputation Survey of Public Higher Education Institution was done, and it focused on the best overall university, research quality, academic resources, academic reputation of faculty, students' university of choice, academic programme quality, postgraduate programme quality, research contribution to society, preparation of tomorrow's leaders, and quality of graduates.

The areas that it focused are quite good. However, personally, I think that there is a need to revamp the target group who would rate these universities. Currently, 242 public and private higher education institution, 2 ASEAN universities (National University of Singapore and Institut Teknologi Brunei), 9 corporations (TNB, TM, Felcra, Petronas, MAS, Sime UEP) and 19 professionals and certification bodies.

I would think that a lot more corporations, especially those multi national companies operate in Malaysia should be involved, unless they choose not to respond? If they choose not to respond, then I guess there is reason to investigate why they do so. The recruiters' perspective would be crucial to evaluate objectively the quality of graduates, at least in terms of those who go to career world.

My 2 cents are above...