THES 2008 Rankings

The 2008 THES rankings are out as many of our readers have noted. Not surprisingly, no Malaysian university made it to the top 200. The top Asian university (not including Australia) is the University of Tokyo at no.18. NUS is ranked 30 and NTU cracked the top 100 at 77.

We've debated the pros and cons of university ranking systems many times in this blog. I'd also highly recommend the blog of Richard Holmes which monitors the methodology of the THES and other university rankings.

If I were the VCs of any of the top public universities in Malaysia (USM, UM, and UKM), I would refrain from playing the THES ranking game and set expectations low by saying things like 'there's no way that a Malaysian public uni can compete with the other universities in this list given that we're still a developing country, we're still trying to increase the % of PhDs among our faculty, we still have to improve our facilities etc...' I've said this before and I'll say it again, none of the public universities in Malaysia is anywhere near the standard of the top 500 universities in the US (where almost 100% of faculty have PhDs)

We'll have to wait until next week to see where the highest ranked Malaysian university appears (probably in the 300s I would guess) but it seems to me that it would be better for our public universities to try to achieve certain internally set targets e.g. 60% of faculty with PhDs and benchmark themselves to certain Asian universities (like our neighbors down south).