faulker059

As my co-bloggers often take pains to point out, rankings are far from everything. But still, rankings are something , so here are the top 200 universities in the world, as ranked by the Times Higher Education Supplement . UM has reentered the top 200, a welcome development. The Vice-Chancellor is targeting further improvement .

Read this from the Duke alumnus magazine. I think it's a good reminder for our VCs - don't try to 'game' the ranking system, concentrate on improving your university in ways you see fit. Under the GargoyleThe Rankings Game: Who's Playing Whom? By John F. Burness U.S. News & World Report published its first annual ranking of the nation's best colleges in 1983. In the years since, the publication has spawned a cottage industry, transformed how the public thinks about higher education, and in the process made a lot of money. Over the past three decades, I've had ample opportunity to dissect the various rankings or discuss the validity of their methodologies in an effort to explain to a wide range of university constituencies, including the news media, why the universities where I worked—the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Cornell, and for the last seventeen years, Duke—were rated where they were. It's fun as I retire from university admini...

The 2008 THES rankings are out as many of our readers have noted. Not surprisingly, no Malaysian university made it to the top 200. The top Asian university (not including Australia) is the University of Tokyo at no.18. NUS is ranked 30 and NTU cracked the top 100 at 77. We've debated the pros and cons of university ranking systems many times in this blog. I'd also highly recommend the blog of Richard Holmes which monitors the methodology of the THES and other university rankings. If I were the VCs of any of the top public universities in Malaysia (USM, UM, and UKM), I would refrain from playing the THES ranking game and set expectations low by saying things like 'there's no way that a Malaysian public uni can compete with the other universities in this list given that we're still a developing country, we're still trying to increase the % of PhDs among our faculty, we still have to improve our facilities etc...' I've said this before and I'll say i...