JEDDAH, 12 July 2007 — Despite all the rhetoric about the need to improve the academic standards of universities in Muslim countries it seems that there lacks a will to address the issue at this time.
The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) launched a project earlier this year to select 20 universities from its 57 member states to be elevated to the rank of the so-called “Top 500 World Universities”.
This process is part of the OIC General Secretariat’s push to achieve goals stated in the Makkah Declaration, which was adopted at the 3rd Extraordinary Summit held in Makkah in December 2005. So far, only five countries have cooperated in forwarding information about their universities with the aim of achieving these goals.
A group of technical experts formed by the ministers of higher education from the OIC member states have finalized the document on the criteria for ranking universities and the particular procedures and mechanisms for selecting the 20 universities. The group proposed five fields of criteria for the selection: research, education, international outlook, facilities and socio-economic impact. They also prepared a questionnaire and technical notes for the OIC countries to complete on their respective universities. The OIC General Secretariat would like to present their findings and recommendations at the next OIC summit to be held in March 2008 in Dakar, Senegal.
But according to a source at the OIC, only five countries have completed that questionnaire. The source declined to name those countries.
Research is one of the important factors in ranking universities in the world and is one of the criteria proposed by the expert group for selecting the top 20 universities in the OIC countries. A preliminary report on the academic rankings of universities in the OIC prepared by the Statistical, Economic and Social Research and Training Center for Islamic Countries (SESRTCIC), an OIC affiliate, showed the top 20 universities based on the number of articles published in 2004-2006 to be Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Kuwait and Malaysia, but the ranking in terms of citations per article are universities in Indonesia, Yemen, Uzbekistan, Iraq and Mozambique.
Another ranking in the report based on a composite index (research quality, research performance, research volume and rate of growth for research quality) showed the top 20 universities to be in Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Malaysia, Pakistan, UAE, Kuwait and Lebanon. The top ranked Saudi university, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, came in at 31 followed by King Saud University at 71.
According to reports by UNESCO and the World Bank Development Indicators for the 1996-2003 period, the average annual spending of OIC countries on R&D (.34% of GDP) is much lower than the global average of 2.36 percent. Their spending is consistently less compared with the national average across a range of income brackets, except for Malaysia and Turkey. Their spending on education varies, but of the 20 poorest performers on the World Bank’s Education Index of 2006, 15 are OIC countries.
Meanwhile, the OIC countries’ low investment in science and technology is reflected in a poor scientific output including low levels of scientific articles and numbers of researchers.
Of the 28 lowest producers of scientific articles, according to the US National Science Foundation in 2006, half are OIC countries. In 2003, the world average for production of articles per million inhabitants was 137; the OIC average was only 13 with the highest publication rates being in Turkey and Iran. And according to the World Bank Development Indicators of 2006, the OIC countries produce so few patents that they are invisible on a bar chart in comparison with other countries.
