Universiti Malaya Again

In many countries performance in international university rankings has become as much a symbol of national accomplishment as winning Olympic medals or qualifying for the World Cup. When a local university rises in the rankings it is cause for congratulations for everyone, especially for administrators. When they fall it is an occasion for soul-searching and a little bit of schadenfreude for opposition groups.

Malaysia has been particularly prone to this syndrome. There was a magical moment in 2004 when the first THES-QS ranking put Universiti Malaya (UM), the country's first university, in the world's top 100. Then it went crashing down . Since then it has moved erratically up and down around the 200th position.

Lim Kit Siang, leader emeritus of the Malaysian opposition has this to say in his blog:

At the University of Malaya’s centennial celebrations in June 2005, the then Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak threw the challenge to University of Malaya to raise its 89th position among the world’s top 100 universities in THES-QS (Times Higher Education Supplement-Quacquarelli Symonds) ranking in 2004 to 50 by the year 2020.

Instead of accepting Najib’s challenge with incremental improvement of its THES ranking, the premier university went into a free fall when in 2005 and 2006 it fell to 169th and 192nd ranking respectively, and in the following two years in 2007 and 2008, fell out of the 200 Top Universities ranking altogether.

In 2009, University of Malaya made a comeback to the 200 Top Universities Ranking when it was placed No. 180, but in 2010 it again fell out of the 200 Top Universities list when it dropped to 207th placing.

For the 2011 QS Top 200 Universities Ranking, University of Malaya returned to the Top 200 Universities Ranking, being placed at No. 167.

In the THES-QS World University Rankings 2009, University of Malaya leapfrogged 50 places from No. 230 placing in 2008 to No. 180 in 2009; while in the 2011 QS World University Ranking, University of Malaya leapt 40 places from No. 207 in 2010 to No. 167 in 2011.

The QS World University Rankings 2012 will be released in 20 days’ time. Can University of Malaya make another leapfrog as in 2009 and 2011 to seriously restore her place as one of the world’s top 100 universities by before 2015?

The government has announced that in addition to Najib’s challenge to University of Malaya in 2005 to be among the world’s Top 50 universities by 2020, the National Higher Education Strategic Plan called for at least three Malaysian universities to be ranked among the world’s top 100 universities.

Recently, the U.S. News World’s Best Universities Rankings included five local universities in its Top 100 Asian Universities, but this is not really something to celebrate about.

The U.S. News World’s Best Universities Ranking is actually based on the QS 2012 Top 300 Asian University Rankings released on May 30 this year, which commented that overall, although University of Malaya improved its ranking as compared to 2011 ranking, the majority of Malaysian universities dropped in their rankings this year as compared to 2011.

There is a lot of detail missing here. UM"s fluctuating scores had nothing to do with failed or successful policies but resulted from errors, corrections of errors, or "clarification of data", changes in methodology and variations in the collecting and reporting of data .

UM was only in the top 100 of the THES-QS rankings because of a mistake by QS, the data collectors, who thought that ethnic minority students and faculty were actually foreigners and therefore handed out a massive and undeserved boost for the international faulty and international student indicators.

Its fall in 2005 was the result of QS's belated realisation of its mistake.

The continued decline in 2007 may have been because QS changed its procedures to prevent respondents to the academic survey voting for their own institutions or because of the introduction of Z scores which had the effect of substantially boosting the scores in citation per faculty for mediocre universities like Peking but only slightly for laggards like UM.

The rise in 2009 from 230th to 180th position was largely the result of a big improvement in the score for faculty student ratio comprising both a reported fall in the number of students and a reported rise in the number of faculty. It is unlikely that the university administration had thrown 6000 students into the Klang River:more probably somebody told somebody that diploma and certificate students need not be included in the data reported to QS.

Whether UM rises again in the QS rankings is less interesting than its performance in the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities. In 2011 it moved into the top 500 with.scores of 3.4 for highly cited researchers and 34.6 for ISI-indexed publications (compared to 100 for the front-runner Harvard) and 16 for per capita productivity (in this case the top scorer was Caltech).

In 2012 UM had the same score for highly cited researchers and registered a score of 38.6 for publications and a slight improvement to 16.7 for productivity. This meant that UM was now ranked in 439th place and that reaching the 300-400 band in  a few years time would not be impossible.

UM has managed to make it into the Shanghai rankings by actively encouraging research among its faculty and by recruiting international researchers, policies that are unpopular and in marked contrast to those of other Malaysian universities.

What will happen in the QS rankings when they come out next month? Something to watch out for is the employer survey, which has a weighting of ten per cent. In 2011 something odd was going on . Apparently there had been an enthusiastic response to the rankings in Latin America especially the employer survey so that QS resorted to capping the scores for many universities. They reported that:

"QS received a dramatic level of response from Latin America in 2011, these counts and all subsequent analysis have been adjusted by applying a weighting to responses from countries with a distinctly disproportionate level of response."

It seems that one effect of the inflated number of responses was to raise the mean score so that universities with below average scores saw a dramatic fall in their adjusted scores. If there is a further increase in responses this year universities like UM may see a further reduction for this indicator.