Universiti Malaya: 89th or Nowhere? (Part III)

Ong Kian Ming, currently pursuing his political science doctorate at Duke University has provided some more detailed analysis to my blog post on whether Universiti Malaya deserves the 89th placing provided by the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) World University Rankings. His analysis was written in the comments column for the part II of my post, but I thought that I should republish his analysis in its entirety as a blog post here:

"In my discussions with some Malaysian friends in the Malaysian Forum mailing list (a mailing list comprising maining US based Malaysian students), we discussed the THES ranking in depth. If you look at the details, there are two points that are noteworthy. Firstly, UM scored 68 in the international student category, the highest score that UM received in the 5 surveyed categories. By this measure, UM ranks 6th in the world i.e. it is the 6th most internationalized university in the world (even above Monash).(Tony P: Huh?!) USM's international student score is even higher, at 78, making it the 4th most internatalized university in the world.

If two of our local top universities has so many international students, then maybe some of our local youth political organizations should direct their ire at the university administrators for letting in so many 'foreigners'. Monash, with a score of 64, has 30% of its student population listed as foreigners. There is no way that UM or USM has a 30% foreign student population at the undergraduate level, at least to me limited knowledge. My suspicion is that THES might have counted non-Malays as 'foreign' students thereby increasing the rating of UM and USM in this category. If this is corrected, as it should be, in the next THES ranking, it wouldn't surprise me if UM and USM drops way down the ranking.

The second noteworthy point is that UM's and USM's Citations / Faculty score which accounts for 20% of the total score is 0. There are 11 schools in the toop 200 with a 0 score in this category and two of them are Malaysian universities. Granted, this score is heavily biased towards the sciences as well as towards English publications (the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and Sorbonne in Paris both score 0 as well) but even then, a large research university with a faculty whom are presumably relatively competent in English should be able to produce a score that is higher than that of let's say LSE, a predominantly social science school, which scored a 6 in this category.

Finally, if you examine THES ranking of Top 100 schools by Science, Engineering & IT, BioScience, Social Science and Top 50 Arts and Humanities, you will find that UM is NOWHERE to be found in these rankings. So the question is, if UM is ranked top 100 in the world, then surely it must be ranked top 100 in at least one of the categories surveyed here, right? Apparently not.

It was so dissapointing for me to observe all those banners around UM when I came back during summer bragging of the fact that they are one of the top 100 universities in the world. When we examine the details, we have many reasons to doubt UM's position among the elite 100 schools. It would be really funny to see what happens if THES improves their methodology next year and UM falls off the top 200. Will the VC then say that the methodology of the survey is wrong? Let's wait and see."

Tony P: I will follow up with my thoughts on the above analysis shortly. Watch this space :)