How to get into the Top 50

Malaysia has declared that it wants to get a couple of local universities into the world's top 50. This obviously means the THES-QS and not the Shanghai Jiao Tong index.

So what should a Malaysian university do to get into the 50 on the THES-QS ranking? I assume that the likeliest candidate is Universiti Malaya (UM) and that it should try to equal the score of the University of Auckland, which was 50th in last year's index.

In 2007, Auckland got a total score of 77.5 made up of 95 for the "peer review", 83 for the employer review, 38 for student faculty ratio, 61 for citations per faculty, 100 for international faculty, and 99 for international students.

UM got a total of 49.4 made up 66 for the "peer review", 66 for the employer review, 38 for the student faculty ratio, 14 for citations per faculty, 63 for international faculty and 41 for international students.

So what does UM have to do to get a score equal to Auckland's?

• First of all , it should make sure that UM is actually included in the survey of academic opinion (see previous post). If it is not, then UM will probably not even make it into the top 500. Then it has to improve its score on this criterion by about half (the use of Z scores means that we can't be more exact than this) .
• Then the score on the employer review would have to increase by about a third.
• No need to worry about the student faculty ratio. UM is as good as Auckland.
• The number of citations per faculty would have to improve four-fold.
• The proportion of international students would have to increase by two thirds.
• The proportion of international students would have to more than double.

I doubt that it is worth trying to do better on the "peer review" and the "employer review" since these are opaque and biased. Increasing the number of international faculty and students would probably cause more trouble than its worth without strict controls over quality.

Could the citations per faculty be improved? This is not totally impossible. Over ten years Cardiff University managed to triple total research output. According to an interview with the Star, noted in an earlier post, this is how it was done.

To encourage productivity, Prof Smith switched the promotion system from a quota-based system (where the total number of professorial positions in a faculty were pre-determined) to a performance-based one.
He even offered an attractive retirement package to faculty members who were not producing much research.
However, in order for universities to be able to do that, Prof Smith said they need autonomy.
“The university has to be free to offer different contracts (to academics and scientists).
“And within the university, a lot of power needs to be devolved to the young people.
“It's all about having decisions taken at the lowest level practicable.
“That’s a major change,” he said.