A good day now hardly passes without another university rankings released by a newspaper (Wall Street Journal), a magazine (BusinessWeek), or, strange enough, a university (Shanghai Jiao Tong). Last week QS issued a brand new ranking: best universities in Asia. Out of one hundred or so universities in Malaysia, five have been placed in the Asia top 100. I don't know much about this QS. It could well be another low-cost airline or even Perkasa in disguise, but they seem to have a soft spot for our universities. QS claims to be non-partisan and non-racial, which doesn't say much these days because Utusan Malaysia is officially a non-partisan and non-racial newspaper. So whenever our university or government functionaries want to look clean and cultured, they'd quote QS rankings, and avoid the more famous TI's Corruption Perception Index because it's not directly related to universities (It's hard not to agree with this logic).
I'm not sure who or what sparked off the rankings race, but my first encounter dates back to 1990 at a bookstore in PJ when I stumbled on a non-fiction work with a mundane title " The Best Business Schools". It's an honour roll of 40 top business schools in US ranked by BusinessWeek, plus an insider look at each school. I just had to buy the book because my school was in there. I didn't go to Harvard, wrong guess. HBS was second anyway. Number one was Kellogg (Northwestern University). My school just about made the cut. My reaction was: how? The school was so bland and spartan that all I could recall was braving a snowstorm one early morning to attend a statistics class. The Dutch professor was so inspiring that he cured my pathological fear of numbers, allowing me lead a normal life. There's no ranking of universities or anything in my younger days. Today you can read a review and ranking of door knobs on the internet. I chose the school only because its business program complied with basic human rights, meaning less quantitative, meaning less maths, and no periodic table.
Ranking of universities will soon overtake cricket as the most corrupt sport. If there's a ranking of all university rankings, I'm sure QS would be right at the bottom of the heap. Any ranking that places Malaysian universities in the top 100 is suspect. For those who've had both local and overseas college experience, it's not too hard to compare and conclude. Half of the local professors are world champions on Malay history, Malay politics and tongkat ali, while our rice and fruit taste and texture have not improved since 1964. They're actually brilliant and first-rate professors. But they can't express, create and engage in productive ground-breaking research because the universities are run by the government that, until today, is still fighting for our country's independence from the British. NGOs with eponymous titles like Desak, Tibai, Gasak, Korap and so forth will be up in arms and accuse me of conspiring with Air Asia X to run down the entire Malay race. OK, Mr Ngo, can you name two professors, just two out of the 2365 professors in Malaysia? For all the tough talk, they can name only one: Prof. Ibrahim Ali.
Remember in 2004 when University of Malaya (UM) was ranked 89th in the world, higher than Nottingham and Indiana? The university and the whole country went berserk. I could see flags with number 89 fluttering all over the campus, and the literature-loving vice chancellor (VC) had all the time to pen a poignant poem on this. A year later he returned to earth with a ranking of 169th. The reason? QS mistook the Chinese and Indian students in UM for students from China and India. I'm sure QS would rank Nilai University College ahead of Imperial College when they find out that 90% of daytime student population in Nilai are Nigerians and Chechens.
I've lost count of how many rankings in the market now. Easily a dozen, maybe more. US News, Forbes, BusinessWeek, the Economist, WSJ, Financial Times, Shanghai J T, Times Higher Education (THE), Princeton Review. And QS, hahaha, of course. Some only rank the business schools. Some only US or UK universities. All of them seem to be consistent on the top five or six (Harvard, Oxford), but beyond that it's pretty much free for all. Worse, some universities rise or drop twenty places in one year in the same rankings. A top twenty in US News is nowhere in THE and vice versa. No Malaysian universities are in Shanghai's top 500 (let's ask them apa lagi China mau?). My school is no longer in the top 40. Now you know why I'm angry. The idea of ranking universities annually is plain bollocks. Universities are not flatscreens or androids. Their reputation and brand were built by the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Isaac Newton over 300 years.
Men are born to like lists and rankings, for the simple reason that lists read easier and sexier than The Lord of The Rings. So we have Fortune 500. Group of Eight. Gang of Four. Seven Sisters. Double mastectomy. The danger is that some people become morbidly obsessed with rankings. University of Malaya VC's only known KPI now is to get the university into the top 100 in the world before 2090. When I was in Petronas, we called this smart objective because it comes with numbers, time and plenty of stress. Incidentally Petronas has just appointed a hard-driving former VP with an honorary doctorate as VC of its prized university (UTP) to gatecrash the world rankings. QS ranks UTP outside the top 200 in Asia. With a joke location and Yiddish name like Tronoh, it can only be uphill. Should we learn from Singapore? The guys at National University of Singapore (ranked 2nd in Asia by QS) just laughed off the university's perennially high ranking. It's a joke, of course. The Chinese government of Singapore get its way with one simple doctrine. What they want they buy: water, maids, submarines, warships, islands, KTM.
There's no way out. Rankings are here for the long haul. BusinessWeek has already expanded with a ranking of business schools for those who sleep in class (I'm serious). Princeton Review has its annual rankings of schools for lesbians, party goers and communists. I heard Platts (an oil and gas trade publication) is seriously considering its own university rankings. With a long experience in rigging oil prices for Shell and BP, it looks like a natural extension. Petronas is a loyal and high-value Platts' customer with a hundred-year subscription to all its extortionate oil publications. There's certainly hope for UTP.
I'm not sure who or what sparked off the rankings race, but my first encounter dates back to 1990 at a bookstore in PJ when I stumbled on a non-fiction work with a mundane title " The Best Business Schools". It's an honour roll of 40 top business schools in US ranked by BusinessWeek, plus an insider look at each school. I just had to buy the book because my school was in there. I didn't go to Harvard, wrong guess. HBS was second anyway. Number one was Kellogg (Northwestern University). My school just about made the cut. My reaction was: how? The school was so bland and spartan that all I could recall was braving a snowstorm one early morning to attend a statistics class. The Dutch professor was so inspiring that he cured my pathological fear of numbers, allowing me lead a normal life. There's no ranking of universities or anything in my younger days. Today you can read a review and ranking of door knobs on the internet. I chose the school only because its business program complied with basic human rights, meaning less quantitative, meaning less maths, and no periodic table.
Ranking of universities will soon overtake cricket as the most corrupt sport. If there's a ranking of all university rankings, I'm sure QS would be right at the bottom of the heap. Any ranking that places Malaysian universities in the top 100 is suspect. For those who've had both local and overseas college experience, it's not too hard to compare and conclude. Half of the local professors are world champions on Malay history, Malay politics and tongkat ali, while our rice and fruit taste and texture have not improved since 1964. They're actually brilliant and first-rate professors. But they can't express, create and engage in productive ground-breaking research because the universities are run by the government that, until today, is still fighting for our country's independence from the British. NGOs with eponymous titles like Desak, Tibai, Gasak, Korap and so forth will be up in arms and accuse me of conspiring with Air Asia X to run down the entire Malay race. OK, Mr Ngo, can you name two professors, just two out of the 2365 professors in Malaysia? For all the tough talk, they can name only one: Prof. Ibrahim Ali.
Remember in 2004 when University of Malaya (UM) was ranked 89th in the world, higher than Nottingham and Indiana? The university and the whole country went berserk. I could see flags with number 89 fluttering all over the campus, and the literature-loving vice chancellor (VC) had all the time to pen a poignant poem on this. A year later he returned to earth with a ranking of 169th. The reason? QS mistook the Chinese and Indian students in UM for students from China and India. I'm sure QS would rank Nilai University College ahead of Imperial College when they find out that 90% of daytime student population in Nilai are Nigerians and Chechens.
I've lost count of how many rankings in the market now. Easily a dozen, maybe more. US News, Forbes, BusinessWeek, the Economist, WSJ, Financial Times, Shanghai J T, Times Higher Education (THE), Princeton Review. And QS, hahaha, of course. Some only rank the business schools. Some only US or UK universities. All of them seem to be consistent on the top five or six (Harvard, Oxford), but beyond that it's pretty much free for all. Worse, some universities rise or drop twenty places in one year in the same rankings. A top twenty in US News is nowhere in THE and vice versa. No Malaysian universities are in Shanghai's top 500 (let's ask them apa lagi China mau?). My school is no longer in the top 40. Now you know why I'm angry. The idea of ranking universities annually is plain bollocks. Universities are not flatscreens or androids. Their reputation and brand were built by the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Isaac Newton over 300 years.
Men are born to like lists and rankings, for the simple reason that lists read easier and sexier than The Lord of The Rings. So we have Fortune 500. Group of Eight. Gang of Four. Seven Sisters. Double mastectomy. The danger is that some people become morbidly obsessed with rankings. University of Malaya VC's only known KPI now is to get the university into the top 100 in the world before 2090. When I was in Petronas, we called this smart objective because it comes with numbers, time and plenty of stress. Incidentally Petronas has just appointed a hard-driving former VP with an honorary doctorate as VC of its prized university (UTP) to gatecrash the world rankings. QS ranks UTP outside the top 200 in Asia. With a joke location and Yiddish name like Tronoh, it can only be uphill. Should we learn from Singapore? The guys at National University of Singapore (ranked 2nd in Asia by QS) just laughed off the university's perennially high ranking. It's a joke, of course. The Chinese government of Singapore get its way with one simple doctrine. What they want they buy: water, maids, submarines, warships, islands, KTM.
There's no way out. Rankings are here for the long haul. BusinessWeek has already expanded with a ranking of business schools for those who sleep in class (I'm serious). Princeton Review has its annual rankings of schools for lesbians, party goers and communists. I heard Platts (an oil and gas trade publication) is seriously considering its own university rankings. With a long experience in rigging oil prices for Shell and BP, it looks like a natural extension. Petronas is a loyal and high-value Platts' customer with a hundred-year subscription to all its extortionate oil publications. There's certainly hope for UTP.
