KUALA LUMPUR: Five Malaysian universities have emerged among the world’s top 300 best universities, according to Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University rankings for 2018 released today.
This year’s results indicate that Malaysia has nearly doubled its share of top-300 universities, up from three in 2017, in what is a successful year for Malaysian higher education.
University of Malaya remains Malaysia’s leading university, and reaches the highest position it has achieved since the first-ever edition of the QS World University Rankings (2004).
It rises by 19 places, and now ranks 114th.
Two other varsities that made it to the top 300 are Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), which rises to 230th position from 302nd and Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), which jumps to 264th from 330th in the world.
Meanwhile, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) rises from 270th to 229th and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) from 288th to 253rd.
Nine Malaysian universities are ranked this year in this global ranking in which five improve, three remain stable, and only one drops.
QS research director Ben Sowter said: “Seven Malaysian universities improve their score for QS’s Academic Reputation metric, while eight improve their score for QS’s Employer Reputation metric.
“These results indicate that Malaysian universities are, in general, improving their reputation among both the global academic community and the world’s employers.”
Meanwhile, Massachusetts Institute of Technology is named the world’s leading university for a record sixth consecutive year.
Stanford University remained second place while Harvard University took third place. California Institute of Technology overtook University of Cambridge this year to take fourth place.
The expert opinion of 75,015 academics and 40,455 employers contributed to the 2018 edition of the rankings with 12.3m papers and 75.1m citations were analysed from the bibliometric database Scopus/Elsevier, to measure the impact of the research produced by the universities ranked.
The full QS World University Rankings 2018 can be found at https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-ran....
Students seeking to make the best decision possible regarding their academic future now also have the opportunity to consult the QS World University Rankings App.
Downloadable from the App Store, it allows candidates to personalise comparisons and alter weightings, focus regions, and subjects. The only university comparison app of its kind, it now features also a Chinese version.