Opinion
QS has released the 2027 edition of the QS World University Rankings, with Asia featuring a record 1,722 institutions, a substantial increase from the 503 institutions included in the 2019 edition.
First published in 2009, with a ranking of the top 200 universities in Asia, this regional ranking has since expanded significantly and continues to be released annually.
The growing number of participating institutions highlights the increasing appetite among universities for international recognition, greater visibility, and opportunities to benchmark their performance against peers within and across national systems.
This expansion also reflects a broader challenge facing many higher education systems: the absence of comprehensive and authoritative national data collection and benchmarking mechanisms.
University leaders and academics in Europe, the United States, Australia and other liberal economies can afford to be more critical of university rankings because they operate within mature higher education systems that possess long-established mechanisms for evaluating academic quality and institutional performance. These systems are supported by centuries of scholarly achievement and strong reputational capital, reducing their reliance on rankings as a primary source of external validation.
In many countries, university leaders, policymakers, prospective students, employers, and the wider community have limited access to consistent comparative data that would enable them to assess the relative standing and performance of institutions across a range of evaluation criteria. Consequently, international rankings have increasingly become an important source of comparative performance information and external validation.
Unpacking the results
This year’s results demonstrate a high degree of year-on-year stability, although competition across the region continues to intensify, driven by improvements in research performance, international engagement, and academic reputation. However, progress remains uneven, reflecting the differing stages of maturity and development across national higher education systems.
The long-term shifts since the inaugural 2009 edition are particularly notable. Japan dominated in 2009, seeing nine universities in the top 20 and 33 in the top 100. In this edition, Japan has no institution in the top 20 and only 12 in the top 100. South Korea has also experienced a relative decline, falling from 17 universities in the top 100 to 14. In contrast, China has significantly strengthened its position, increasing from 11 universities in the top 100 to 28, while Malaysia has more than doubled its representation from five to 11 institutions.
This comparison highlights the varying trajectories of higher education systems across the region and reflects the narrow focus of all university rankings. Despite substantial expansion and investment in higher education, countries such as India and Indonesia have not recorded a corresponding increase in the number of universities ranked among the top 100, making growth in scale alone insufficient. Sustained improvement in research capacity, internationalisation, academic reputation, and institutional quality remains critical to achieving greater representation at the upper end of regional rankings.
Untangling global and regional rankings
Over the years, I have argued that regional and specialised rankings play an important role within the broader rankings landscape. Comparing institutions on a global scale is often problematic, as universities operate in vastly different contexts, pursue different missions, and serve diverse stakeholder needs. In many instances, there is limited common ground on which meaningful comparisons can be made, compounded by the absence of universally agreed definitions and measures for assessing institutional performance.
Regional rankings help address some of the asymmetries inherent in global rankings by providing a more contextually relevant basis for comparison. Institutions operating within the same geographic region are often subject to relatively similar policy environments, economic conditions, demographic trends, and developmental priorities, therefore making comparisons more meaningful and actionable.
Importantly, the eligibility requirements and inclusion thresholds for regional rankings typically differ from those applied in global rankings. Regional rankings generally adopt lower participation thresholds across a range of indicators, enabling a broader and more diverse group of institutions to be included. This provides greater visibility for universities that may not meet the scale or research intensity required for inclusion in global rankings, while still allowing them to benchmark their performance against relevant peers and identify areas for improvement.
As a result, regional rankings can serve as an important developmental tool, offering institutions valuable insights into their relative strengths and weaknesses and supporting capacity-building efforts that may ultimately enhance their competitiveness on the global stage.
Regional and specialised rankings have also become an important commercial and strategic product for the various rankings and data aggregation organisations operating in the higher education sector. Their growing prominence has made them increasingly difficult for university leaders, academics, policymakers, and wider society to ignore.
As these rankings attract greater media attention and stakeholder interest, they exert increasing influence over institutional reputation, strategic priorities, and policy discussions. While they provide valuable comparative insights, their prominence also raises important questions about how institutional quality and performance are defined, measured, and communicated to the public.
Consequently, the question for many university leaders is no longer if rankings matter, but rather how they should engage with rankings to support institutional priorities without distorting mission, strategy, or purpose.
Regional versus global indicators
The QS Asia Rankings was the first regional ranking introduced by QS and its methodology has remained unchanged for years. The ranking contains 11 indicators, of which seven are also used in the QS World University Rankings, while four are specific to the Asia ranking.
The weights for similar metrics in the global and regional editions vary to account for the regional specific measures.
Unlike all other regional rankings, the Asian ranking is the only one that includes two measures of international student mobility (inbound and outbound), a reflection of the importance of internationalisation and global engagement to the region. The other two measures are papers per faculty and staff with doctorates.
Given the increased participation from Asian universities, it may be time for QS assess whether these regional measures are still relevant to reflect the transformation of higher education in the region.
Possible enhancements
To strengthen the Research and Discovery lens, which currently includes Academic Reputation, Citations per Paper, and Papers per Faculty, QS could introduce an indicator measuring research and academic integrity. Such a measure would respond to widespread concerns regarding research quality, publication practices, ethical compliance, and institutional diligence, while encouraging universities to uphold the highest standards of scholarly conduct.
To strengthen the Learning Experience lens, QS could supplement the existing Faculty-to-Student Ratio and Staff with PhD indicators with measures that better capture educational quality and student outcomes. Potential additions include retention or attrition rates, indicators of access and participation among students from disadvantaged or underrepresented backgrounds, and measures of student success such as completion, attainment, or graduation rates. Collectively, these measures would provide a more comprehensive assessment of institutional effectiveness in supporting student learning and achievement.
The Engagement lens currently only emphasises global engagement or the extent to which institutions are internationalised. However, universities in this region typically emphasize applied education, industry collaboration and partnerships, students’ placements in community and industry, community engagement, and how they contribute to solving local economic and societal issues. QS could introduce measures to reflect these national and regional dimensions, thereby strengthening this lens. Expanding its scope would provide a more balanced assessment of institutional impact, recognising universities that make significant contributions to their local communities, industries, and regional development agendas.
While rankings will likely remain contested, these enhancements could chart a new path towards a more balanced and meaningful assessment of institutional performance, particularly for non-historical institutions. Such a shift would increase their value as a tool for improvement, accountability, and strategic decision-making across increasingly diverse higher education systems.
Angel Calderon, higher education global expert, serves as the Director of Strategic Insights at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia and a member of the QS Rankings Advisory Board.