Universiti Malaya is No. 29 in the latest Quacquarelli Symonds Asia's top 30 rankings, moving up three spots from the last evaluation. – The Malaysian Insider file pic, June 10, 2015.
UM climbed three places to finish 29th in the table, while Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) also climbed from 57th place to break into the top 50, by ranking 49th.
Overall, 17 out of Malaysia's 21 public universities had improved on their previous year rankings, with only three dropping and one unchanged.
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) and Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) were other Malaysia varsities in the top 100.
Ben Sowter, head of QS research, said it was clear that progress was happening in Malaysia, especially in terms of its growing reputation in international academia.
“Malaysia has great ambitions and places education and innovation as among top priorities on its agenda.”
UM improved significantly in the faculty-student ratio indicator, ranking 11th in Asia, and 19th in the international faculty indicator.
USM, which broke into the top 50 in Asia, improved in several indicators – academic reputation, faculty-student ratio, paper per faculty and international faculty.
While the QS rankings have been frequently cited by Malaysia's Education Ministry as proof that local universities are world class, they have, however, been described by the Times Higher Education (THE) rankings as employing "very weak and simplistic methodology".
THE editor Phil Baty has told The Malaysian Insider previously that the ministry's reliance on QS rankings had created an "overoptimistic, distorted" idea of how local universities actually fared when compared with competitors around the world.
Malaysian universities have often fared poorly in the THE rankings and some have stopped submitting data for THE.
The London-based QS has agreed with THE that its rankings should not be used as the only measure of quality of Malaysian institutions.
Sowter has said S rankings were only one range of publicly available measures, and cautioned universities and policy makers to combine data from various sources to form an accurate diagnosis of universities' performance.
“We strongly discourage anyone from making important choices on the basis of only one input," Sowter had said.
Yesterday, Second Education Minister Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh was reported saying that while he agreed the QS rankings were not the sole measure of quality, they remained a gauge of the quality of a tertiary institution.
"People still talk about QS ranking.
"When we look at the university, we still go to QS ranking, not just in terms of university but also subject ranking," Idris was quoted as saying by the media yesterday.
In the current QS Asia rankings, Singapore's National University of Singapore (NUS) remains the top ranked university in the region, while University of Hong Kong climbs up to second.
The top 10 are dominated by universities from Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and China.
Japan has the most universities in the Asia top 50, with 12, followed by China and Korea which have nine universities each.
Taiwan has seven, while both of Singapore's two universities are in the top 10.
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