Obsessing about university rankings

By Ong Kian Ming. I FIRST started paying closer attention to the methodology of university rankings in 2005 when Universiti Malaya (UM) was miraculously ranked 89th in the early days of the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) global university ranking. 
My colleague, Tony Pua, and I speculated that this high ranking was mostly due to a misclassification of Chinese and Indian Malaysian students as ‘foreigners’ thereby giving the false impression that UM was as ‘international’ as Monash University in Australia. THES subsequently admitted to this error which once corrected, saw UM quickly tumble out of the top 100 ranking. More...