Of notable achievement is Universiti Malaya, which reached its highest position since the first edition of the QS World University Rankings were released in 2004, the New Straits Times reported.
While UM moved up from 133 to 114, two other universities – Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) and Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) – broke into the top 300 mark, improving on their rankings by 72 places (to rank 230) and 66 places (264), respectively.
Rounding up the Malaysian universities in the top 300 are Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), ranking 229 (up from 270) and 253 (288), respectively.
The QS World University Rankings also shows that the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) dropped from the 601-650 range to 701-750. Another three universities which made it into the rankings are Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) and Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM), in the 701-750 and 751-800 range, respectively.
“Seven Malaysian universities improved their score for QS’s Academic Reputation metric, while eight improved 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,” QS research director Ben Sowter was quoted as saying by NST.
In Asia, Singapore continues to top the list having two universities come out as the top two in Asia, namely Nanyang Technological University (NTU, world rank 11) and National University of Singapore (NUS, 15). China’s Tsinghua University ranked third in Asia, and 25th overall.
Meanwhile, UM ranks 26 in Asia, while UPM and UKM come in at 45 and 46, respectively in the region.
Overall, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was once again named the world’s leading university. It is the sixth year in a row for the prestigious US institution of higher learning.
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.
According to the QS World University Rankings report, the placings are based on the expert opinion of 75,015 academics and 40,455 employers, after analysing 12.3m papers and 75.1m citations from the bibliometric database Scopus/Elsevier, to measure the impact of the research produced by the universities ranked.
https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2018