Local varsities fail rankings test again

The Times list of 400 best universities has two Singapore institutions in the top 100.

PETALING JAYA: Malaysia has failed for the second time in a row to make it into the Times list of the world’s top 400 universities.

Not a single local university appears in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2012-2013, released today.

In contrast, two Singapore institutions are among the top 100, with the National University of Singapore (NUS) at 29th place and the Nanyang Technological University at 86th.

The top ten are seven US-based and three UK-based universities, with the California Institute of Technology stealing the show at 95.5 points.

NUS got 77.5 points and Nanyang 59.4 points.

The only other Southeast Asian university in the list is Thailand’s King Mongkut’s University of Technology, at 351st place.

The Times Higher Education website says universities were judged according to 13 performance indicators from five areas: teaching, research, citations, industry income and international outlook.

It says universities were excluded from the list if they:

• did not teach undergraduates

• taught only “a single narrow subject”

• produced less than 1,000 research articles between 2006 and 2010, or 200 a year.

‘Our focus is on research’

In an immediate response, Minister of Higher Education Khaled Nordin said Malaysia’s absence from the list could be because the country forayed into research only recently.

“Times used an evaluation of over ten years,” he told FMT. “Our focus on research in universities only started in 2007. So, most of our universities didn’t participate.”

Khaled did not indicate whether he was disappointed with the results, but he spoke about local universities’ participation in the QS World University Rankings 2012/2013, which uses five-year data.

Universiti Malaya and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia came in at 156th and 261st place in the QS list.

According to the QS website, universities are assessed in six areas: academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty/student ratio, citations per faculty as well as international faculty and student ratio.