More to higher education than rankings

I refer to the letter ‘UTAR excels in just 15 years’ by Ain Hashim, (The Star, April 8) which was a response to the article ‘UTAR among top young varsities’ on the standard of higher education in our country.

Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman’s (UTAR) recognition in the Times Higher Education Young University Rankings has been widely published in print and online media over the past few weeks.

Malaysians and especially UTAR students and staff have also been celebrating the achievement on social media.

This achievement, seemingly putting us on par with some of the established local universities, is even more admirable given UTAR’s relatively young age of 15 years.

For perspective, the year UTAR was founded, Warner Bros had just released their second instalment of the Harry Potter films - The Chamber of Secrets. This is well within the living memory of most readers. Assuming the first ever batch of UTAR students graduated in their early twenties, hardly any of them would be in their 40s. There is no doubt the ranking is positive news.

Yet as a UTAR graduate myself (Class of 2012), I would caution both former UTAR students and the public to adopt a healthy scepticism towards this news.

Besides being a UTAR alumnus, I have been working in education for the better part of five years, and I completed a Master’s degree in education at the University of Cambridge.

I have an ongoing concern and interest in the state of education in Malaysia.

Others can give a more technical critique of the rankings. Yet to put it simply, I will just suggest that even the sophisticated audit methodology employed by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for Times Higher Education falls short of truly reflecting the educational experience, value-add and positive impact of a university.

Though we can have some limited measure of the factors that do matter to a university’s educational mission, this experience is too complex to fully capture by weighted numbers.

Certainly, there will be some students whose experiences do not match the rosy-picture painted by the high rankings of even the most renowned universities in the world.

There will be also crucial educational factors that are not reflected by the ranking.

For example, some of UTAR’s Pillars of Education, including Virtue and Morality; and Sociality and Humanitarianism, are arguably not taken into account by these rankings, which overwhelmingly focus on research output and influence (citations).

Ultimately I would argue that UTAR’s educational mission and vision are broader and more encompassing than laid out by Times Higher Education.

At UTAR, the mission is to not just churn out capable graduates, but produce graduates that have both keen intellect and civic-minded virtues.

My opinion is that we should be encouraged by the recent university rankings, but not be carried away by too narrow a conception of educational success.

UTAR will continue to grow and improve, but I hope that it will also try to achieve its goals in a more holistic manner.

TIONG NGEE DERK Kampar