COMMENT | Malaysia's universities should stop measuring prestige and start measuring progress. More importantly, our government and higher education stakeholders should understand what the difference is.

Graduation rates in our university data systems are used to measure student progress in our society.

Also, global ranking agencies like Times Higher Education (THE), Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy (or the Academic Ranking of World Universities, AWRU) assign prestige ratings to universities around the world via university “inputs”.

These include the infrastructure that a university has, their sources of research funds, the size of these endowments and that amorphous thing called “international reputation”.

This begs the question, what should this reputation be based on? If we are to rank any university in Malaysia, it should be based primarily on the quality of teaching, and the kind of research and publications that are produced by that university’s scholars.

Furthermore, quality here should refer to how relevant the academic output is, for the current challenges facing our society.

This is not captured in QS, THE or ARWU data systems. Yet, the world is fixated on metrics generated by these agencies, leaving little intellectual commitment to the more important task of academic relevance.

This relevance is reflected in the syllabi used in classrooms, the choice of problems selected for research projects, and the themes highlighted in journal articles and books published that both decision-makers and the ordinary public can relate to.

Malaysian academics should teach, do research, write and publish relevant themes that contribute directly to the country’s human development, and not only to its economic and financial progress.

If we sincerely want to reform our universities and the nation’s education system, we must ask the following difficult questions...