Monday, May 07, 2012

Deja Vu All Over Again

Malaysia's love-hate affair with international rankings has taken another twist. The official target now is get one university in the top 50 and three in the top 100 in the QS rankings. That basically means that a Malaysian university will have to be the equal of New South Wales, Tsinghua or Warwick.

Last year Universiti Malaya got into the top 500 in the Shanghai ARWU ranking. That is a solid achievement and it might mean more  if Malaysia could get another university there.


This is as part of its efforts to have a local university ranked among the world's top 50 universities by 2020.
Deputy Higher Education Minister Datuk Saifuddin Abdullah said the National Higher Education Strategic Plan also called for at least three local universities to be ranked among the world's top 100 universities.
To achieve this, he told the house that it needed to continuously recruit international students and participate in international education fairs to promote the "Education Malaysia" brand.
He was replying to Senator Mohd Khalid Ahmad who wanted to know why no local universities had been ranked among the world's top 200.
Saifuddin said the ministry was also intensifying promotional activities on the Internet and introducing student mobility programmes. This will allow them to take short-term courses with credits, and have better staff and student exchange programmes with foreign universities.
He said they were also having better scholarship coordination with foreign agencies and other bodies to facilitate the intake of foreign students at local universities.
He said the QS World University Ranking (QS WUR) was the preferred benchmark used to gauge a university.

1 comment:

  1. I understand our objective to achieve such recognition especially when our neighbour downunder, Singapore has its universities on the top of all charts.

    But in Singapore, NUS,NTU and SMU are elitist and expensive. Even the local community finds it difficult to gain an entry.

    Higher education should always focus on the community. It is better to ensure that any university give high quality education for the benefit of the local community (or country). Good examples would be the State University of New York (SUNY) system, California State University (CSU) and our local, my alma mater, Universiti Teknologi MARA.

    Resources should be spend on teaching people 'how to fish'.

    Love your blog sir!

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