Malaysia is out of the top 400 varsities

No Malaysian university made the cut in this year's Times Higher Education (THE) magazine's list of top 400 world universitiy rankings.

Lamenting this, DAP supremo Lim Kit Siang said that the THE rankings had poured cold water on initial jubilation over Malaysia's performance in the QS 200 World University Rankings 2011/12.

The QS rankings had put Universiti Malaya on the 167 spot, up 40 places from 2010.

Four others Malaysian ranked by QS - Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UiTM) - slid down the scale.

According to the THE rankings, the top ten spots were occupied by California Institute for Technology, Harvard and Stanford (2), Oxford (3), Princeton (5) Cambridge (6), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (7), Imperial College London (8), Chicago (9) and Berkeley (10).

As for the regional neighbours, six universities in Hong Kong and two from Singapore made the list.

Thailand's Mahidol University also made the cut, making it into the 351-400 category.

Universiti Malaya (UM) vice-chancellor Professor Ghauth Jasmon was once reported as saying that local universities needed to spend a minimum of RM200 million in research to be among the world's top universities.