No Malaysian U in The 400

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 7 — No Malaysian university made the grade in this year’s Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings, which lists the world’s top 400 universities. This is despite Universiti Malaya’s (UM) greatly improved performance in last month’s QS World University Rankings, leaping 40 places from 2010 to 167.Malaysia’s oldest university was the only local institution to breach the QS top 200 mark after improving its academic, employment and international scores.

US, UK and European universities continued their traditional domination of the league tables in the THE rankings released yesterday. The California Institute of Technology — or Caltech — secured top spot, followed by Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, Princeton. In the bottom half of the top 10 were Cambridge University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Imperial College London, Chicago University and Berkeley.

Only 18 Asian universities made the top 200, led by the University of Tokyo (30), University of Hong Kong (34), National University of Singapore (40) and Peking University (49). Pohang University of Science and Technology (53), Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (94) and Seoul National University (124) — all from South Korea — also made the cut.

Down under, University of Melbourne (37) beat rivals Australian National University (38) and the University of Sydney (58) to be the highest ranked Australian university in the top 200. The THE rankings, which first appeared as a supplement in The Times of London, are now published by the Times Higher Education magazine. The weekly is regarded as the UK’s leading higher education publication.