Universities have plenty of roles to play in teaching, research, outreach, policy-oriented, and business. Besides, teaching, curriculum updates, researching the need-based, and identifying the gap areas in the concerned subjects, programs, and updating the students’ knowledge of horizons in the proactive dimensions. Research is being told as known to unknown, science to non-science, and careful consideration of a specific problem. Earl Robert Babbie, a USA Sociologist, emphasized in his colossal book entitled The Practice of Social Research in 1975 a research should be a systematic inquiry,
Conceptualization framework with crystal clear description, explanation thoroughly, prediction, and forecasting, to help future, and budding scholars, and control the conceptualization to logically interconnect. The institutes of higher learning with quality faculty cohorts are forerunners in raising the thinking power of the students to the next level. The universities belonging to Asia motivate their research, and development wings to show their strength in higher education. The recent edition of the Times Higher Education Asia University Rankings brings out the advances in certain areas which should be focussed and sharpened. The prominent academics, decision-makers, and researchers who assembled under one umbrella at Kula Lumpur, Malaysia recently at The Asia Universities Summit from the diversified fields of higher education realized that collaboration with other academic entities across the world is a compact mechanism to impart the skills in general and the updated methodology, data science, tools for research, scaling techniques, qualitative data and its relevance through the rigorous analysis. Without a second thought, the delegates have sketched out despite challenges obvious in umpteen forms in the Asian region including, linguistics, first-generation students even today, rural ambiance, learning the dynamics of human society, and close link with the industrial growth, gender equality, health parameters, planning with a proper perspective are the key areas have to be strengthened. The Higher Education Minister of Malaysia accentuates that human society should be thoroughly studied as a whole, and the challenges can be estimated to find out the problem-solving mechanisms. The working culture of higher education systems in Asia proves their strength in the extensive progress of Chinese Universities when compared to last year China has the four top universities today accounting for five since Zhejiang University moved up to the ninth position from twelve which transferred has come at Hong Kong’s cost, which now has only two universities in the top ten, compared with three formerly. The first two positions go towards Tsinghua and Peking Universities since they are in a position to retain their positions at number one and two, respectively. The Research Quality Pillar, a newly coined concept that has replaced the citations for research articles to assess, the methodical skills, and deeper analysis, and Tsinghua University has climbed from 43rd to 8th position in the ranking for research quality, and Peking University has moved positively in from 73rd to 20th in the ranking order. The Research Quality Pillar beforehand measured only field-weighted citation influence, but it now also takes in research strength, a guide to how strong typical research is, using the 75th percentile of field-weighted citation impact, research excellence reflecting the amount of world-leading research at an institution, based on the capacity of research in the uppermost 10.00% across the world, and research influence, a wider look at excellence, based on the volume of research recognized by the most influential research in the world. These new measures give us a better idea of the amount of high-quality research produced by institutions. If we turn our attention to Japan, which has a similar trend is obvious in Japan, where universities like The University of Tokyo, and Tohoku Universities have registered better scores in this year’s research quality pillar associated with last year’s citations pillar. As a result, they occupy the top of the overall table structure, Tokyo has risen from 8th to 5th position, Kyoto from 18th to 13th position, and Tohoku from 34th to 20th spot to narrate their research abilities with four formulas as accuracy, systematization, logical connectivity, and generalization (ASLG). The disappointing performance of South Korea’s universities is to be learned the reasons in the overall rankings. In 2023, Seoul National University was just outside the top 10, occupying 11th place, but it has fallen to 14th, Yonsei University, Seoul campus, has dropped from 13th to 17th, and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has slipped from 17th to 18th. Despite positive notes in connection with the teaching and research environment pillars in the South Korean Universities, they never improved as Chinese institutions done, they slipped down the overall ranking.
The institutes of higher learning in China now keep the concentration on quality research which focuses their complete attention on an empirical basis, good analytics, fabulous interpretation, areas of improvement, and rigorous publication spirit. The top five universities in China have scored 87.3, a sizeable level when compared to the previous year’s calculations for their fusion of academic and research arenas. Futao Huang, Professor at the Research Institute for Higher Education at Hiroshima University, says that China is making very rapid progress in terms of highly cited papers, and made remarkable achievements in some key areas such as artificial intelligence, gene editing, quantum communication, space technology, and more to creep ahead of the USA when it came to highly cited papers. Huang believes the country will become a regional hub and exert greater influence over nearby nations by attracting more students and scholars from nearby countries and conducting more academic exchanges and cooperation with Asian countries in terms of teaching and scientific research. There is no doubt that Asian countries now do well to become more dominant in terms of academic research in the next one to two decades. Increasingly, researchers in the Asian region are collaborating with scientists and engineers around the world. In addition, the Chinese Government has signed bilateral and multilateral Science and Technology agreements with at least 115 countries around the world to institute relationships in Science, Engineering, Technology and Human Sciences are concerned. Collaborative research passes along knowledge and research capacity, which can help the less developed partner.
Impressive Roles of Asian Universities in Research
Dr. C. Venkatachalam,
Mentor Professor & ICSSR Senior Fellow,
Department of Sociology, and Population Studies,
Bharathiar University,
Coimbatore – 641 046, Tamil Nadu.
e-mail: cvenkatpu@gmail.com