Letters
by Uwe Dippel
Senior Lecturer
Department of Systems and Networking
College of Information Technology
Universiti Tenaga Nasional

My comment on the University Rankings

That is what I tend to see and hear around me in these days, after the annual world rankings of universities have been published.

As a reminder: the rankings published by QS saw UM rising to place 167, while all other Malaysian universities went down by around 20-30 each, with UTM falling out of the top 400 completely.

Then, on October 7th, another ranking provider, Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) saw
all Malaysian universities falling straight out of the top 400, including Universiti Malaya.

No wonder about those faces looking at me and those remarks. So, have we university lecturers just been in a state of tidur, fast asleep, and lazying about during the last years? I can’t blame the public for their initial feelings. Though the matter is not quite that straightforward and simple.

Allow me to add some insight into this topic.

For this purpose we have to go back some years into the past. To eventually everyone’s astonishment, probably Universiti Malaya herself, UM happened to be ranked 89 globally in 2004.

This was the first year that Times Higher Education Supplement published rankings based on results from work outsourced to QS. The fact remains, that it was kind of an unexpected success, and when one achieves such a type of unexpected laurels, one ought to be cautious, very cautious. When such an unexpected – and yet welcome – recognition rolls in, one needs to ask if one can uphold the status in future and under close scrutiny.

We in the academic community were quite adamant then, that Universiti Malaya was a good university, though not that good. There were three problems with this ranking as offered by QS; firstly there
was an objective mistake in the calculation, pointed out to QS by me (though I don’t know if I was the first one) and subsequently acknowledged by QS.

Secondly, there was a miscommunication between UM and QS. Additionally, some methodological problems were prevailing in the setup of the exercise. On the other hand one has to accept that it was a first-time exercise for QS and THES, and future corrections and improvements were offered.

As an after-effect of this unexpected result, suddenly half of the Malaysian academic community as well as the Ministry of (Higher) Education became busy with the topic of rankings. Nobody wanted to listen to the cautious remarks that 89 was just not realistic. On the contrary, it was thought that some extra, concerted effort would catapult UM even higher. This didn’t actually work out, for neither of the Malaysian universities.

And here is why: The principal reason for this non-achievement is not found inside Malaysia and her universities, rather outside. The authorities failed to properly analyse the competition closely. Therefore they failed to understand that the field of competitors was largely incomplete in 2004 and still is. The playing field was all but static during the last few years.

As someone with quite a number of contacts with European universities, I can vouch for the fact that some years ago almost none of these universities was even thinking in terms of ranking, while as of 2011 it still is a minority.

Germany for example has meanwhile identified 9 universities out of her more than 200 to join the race for excellence. Likewise in the other countries of continental Europe, most universities are still focused on societal, local or subject-related objectives. In a nutshell, the large amount of universities had/has yet to actively enter the race.

The consequences are glaring: When a specific institution was ranked highly with little effort, with many more competitors joining and many of these competitors starting to become really serious, this
institution will fall in the ranking despite of objective improvements.

And this is what we are currently experiencing here in Malaysia. There are serious efforts ongoing in the universities as well as in the Ministry of Higher Education to increase the standing of the Malaysian universities; with respect to publication, academic visibility, peer-to-peer perception, etc. Without these efforts, the Malaysian universities would surely have fallen even further behind.

In my humble opinion, it was and is a mistake to have many Malaysian universities trying to enter this (rat-)race; for most the mere thought about it is a waste of time.

Looking at the larger part of the Malaysian universities, they are significantly young, at the building-up phase and trying to establish themselves. Making it into the globally recognised set of universities requires a long-lasting effort, most of the highly ranked universities have a long tradition, and maybe more than one generation of dedicated academicians’ work, based on generous and long-term funding.

For the average Malaysian university there are many more pressing things to look into than global ranking. It is remarkable that seemingly only one university, USM, perceived and publicly stated that it had other priorities.

There is a good news in this and a bad news. The good one is, that when we manage to keep our rankings, it is a sign of actual improvement.

When our rankings are increasing, the improvements are significant. The bad news is that we are actually just not there yet.

We might not have reached the bottom of the valley. There are obviously many universities that have yet to enter the competition, and others in the range of our rankings who have yet to seriously
start competing, while we already have.

That puts us in the Malaysian universities in a not too favourable position: as much as we struggle
in these days, and objectively improve along the way, we can not yet expect to reap the results in an ever growing field of also competent competitors.

We have to work harder and we might as well need to ponder on our current strategies to further improve the standing of the Malaysian universities. But that’s a different topic altogether.