KUALA LUMPUR: The Education Ministry is targeting two public universities in the country to be in the top world 100 best universities by 2020.
Second Education Minister Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh said the government would implement the Malaysian Education Blueprint (Higher Education) for 2015-2025 which would be launched on April 7, to drive efforts towards achieving the objective.
“The Ministry has been giving due attention to the ranking issue and is encouraging institutions of higher learning (IPT) to improve their standings in international rankings especially the QS World University Rankings,” he said when winding up the debate on the motion of thanks on the Royal Address by the Yang di-Pertuan Agong in the Dewan Rakyat, here today.
He said currrently, even though local universities had not reached the world’s best 100 universities, many IPTs had succeeded in soaring upwards in rankings.
As an example, he said based on QS Rankings, Universiti Malaya (UM) had improved its position from 167th to 151st; Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) from 269th to 259th apart from Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) from 355th to 309th.
In fact Idris said UM had overtaken several leading universities including University of Exeter; Hong Kong Polytechnic University; Michigan State University and Georgetown University.
Apart from that, he said the environmental science programmeof USM was recognised as the 28th in the world ranking while the agricultural programme of UPM was ranked as the 54th in the world.
Nonetheless, he said based on achievements, the people needed to correct the perception that local universities were not as good as universities overseas.
“We like to speak highly of foreign universities and say local universities are not so good.
“Our universities are still young, still teenagers as most of them were less than 50 years old...UM has just attained 60 years if compared to other universities that are more than 100 years old,” he said. - BERNAMA