Higher Education Minister Datuk Seri Mohamed Khaled Nordin said that “the purpose of Setara is to enable universities to measure their quality and see where they stand in relation to one another.” [Thestar]

Thing is, the comparison is meaningless if we don’t have any university that is on par with the world’s best universities. There is no point being the best among the worst.

The Setara ranking is obviously created to counteract the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) World University Rankings which often undermined our local universities. I am not a big fan of THES either, as I think it’s very biased in favour of English based universities… but that doesn’t mean that it has no credibility at all.

Besides, we don’t need a ranking system to know how good or bad our universities are. I graduated from UM five years ago, and I know what level we were at; and to imagine that the quality has worsened since then… I don’t even want to think about it.

If our ministry wants to come out with a ranking system of our own, they should at least compare our universities with others and see how we ranked. Singapore has a couple of respectable universities to be compared with, and Thailand has one or two universities that ranked better than us in THES too.

Let’s compare our university with others using our own ranking system, i.e. NUS, NTU and Chulalongkorn University etc. and see how we fare… the Setara would be much more meaningful that way.

Regardless, it’s the follow-up steps and actions that matter. What is our ministry trying to do to improve the quality of our local universities?

Identifying an Apex university (or two) means nothing; we could again pick two relatively good apples among a basket of rotten fruits… it is meaningless.

One of the best ways to identify the universities’ qualities is assessments by employers and future employers… but heck, the criteria is not considered at all in our Setara ranking. Our ministry needs to start listening from the right people and stop hiding behind the desk.