PETALING JAYA: Kuala Lumpur has missed the cut in the ranking of the 50 QS Best Student Cities to be released today.
Malaysia’s capital city was ranked 43rd last year and 44th in 2012.
Of the 50 cities for tertiary students to live in this year, Paris topped the list, followed by Melbourne and London.
The highest ranking Asian city is Hong Kong at fifth place, followed by Singapore (15), Taipei (25), Beijing (26) and Shanghai (32).
The annual ranking, carried out by the team which compiles the QS World University Rankings, assesses cities based on five main criteria – university rankings, student mix, “desirability” or quality of living, employer activity and affordability.
To qualify for the ranking, cities must have a population of over 250,000 and be home to at least two ranked institutions in the QS World University Rankings.
This year’s ranking included new considerations such as safety, pollution and tolerance as well as Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index and The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Liveability Ranking.
QS head of research Ben Sowter said the team received feedback from students concerned about safety as well as those of “certain religious backgrounds or sexual preferences” who had raised concerns about the social and cultural environment.
“(The) ethical environment in which an organisation of the scale of a university finds itself will have an inevitable influence on its ability to serve its students,” he said, adding that the team hoped to include students’ opinions in future rankings.
Sowter said the main dip in points for Kuala Lumpur were in the university ranking and quality of living categories.
“The inclusion of safety and pollution indices are the key factors under ‘Desirability’,” he said, adding that the city might have also been affected by a “correction” in previous results being overgenerous to cities with small numbers of ranked institutions.
While Kuala Lumpur received high marks for affordability (98 out of 100), it did not fare as well for university rankings (34) and employer activity (44).
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