Malaysia has emerged as the most represented country in Southeast Asia, according to the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings by Subject 2025.
With 277 subject entries across 55 academic disciplines, up from 241 the previous year, Malaysia outperforms regional peers such as Thailand (136 entries), Indonesia (128), and Singapore (99).
When broad faculty areas are considered, Malaysia's total entries increased to 334 in 2025, compared to 284 last year. Of these, Malaysia was featured 287 times in narrow subject rankings and 47 times in broad faculty rankings. The broad faculty areas include Arts and Humanities, Engineering and Technology, Life Sciences, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences.
Malaysian universities are now represented in nearly every discipline, with only six narrow subjects lacking coverage.
The country also leads in the number of ranked institutions (27) and new entries (51) this year.
Overall, 52 Malaysian institutions’ subjects improved, 103 remained neutral while 72 saw their rank decline. Malaysia also recorded 11 entries in the global top 50, matching its total from last year and boasts 46 entries among the world’s top 100.
Two of the nation's institutions have also made it into the world’s top 20, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP) ranks 16th in Petroleum Engineering, while Taylor’s University is ranked 20th in Hospitality and Leisure Management.
Five Malaysian institutions entered the global top 100 for the first time, including USCI University for Arts and Humanities, Universiti Malaya (UM) and Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) for Marketing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI), Taylor’s University for History of Art, and UM for Dentistry.
The country also saw three new institutions namely, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS), Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UMP), and INTI International University making their debut in the rankings.
Both UM and UPM see 12 of their subject entries improve in this year’s edition.
Seven Malaysian universities have improved their highest-ranked entries in 2025, including Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS), Universiti Malaysia Pahang Al-Sultan Abdullah (UMPSA), Multimedia University (MMU), UCSI University, Sunway University, UPM, and UTM.
According to a QS press release dated March 12, Computer Science and Information Systems was shown to garner the highest number of entries in 2025 at 20, up from 16 last year.
Additionally, QS senior vice-president Ben Sowter said the country’s institutions recorded significant improvements in research performance, particularly in Citations per Paper and the H-Index.
He also said that UCSI and Sunway University are among the region’s most improved institutions this year, each now with at least 10 entries in the ranking.
“Asia’s higher education landscape is continuing to improve year on year and Malaysia is an important part of this.
“The breadth of entries from the country included in the top 50 is testament to the wide-ranging strength in Malaysian tertiary education”, he said.
The global higher education analysts said more than half of Malaysia’s ranked subjects received lower scores in the Employer Reputation (ER) metric compared to other countries.
According to the release, the decline in employer satisfaction overshadowed the improvements in research performance.
The rankings offer an independent, comparative analysis of over 18,300 academic programs from more than 1,700 universities across 100 locations worldwide, covering 55 academic disciplines and five major faculty areas.
These rankings are part of the annual QS World University Rankings portfolio, which was consulted 80 million times and cited in 134,000 media and institutional reports in 2024.
