Universiti Utara Malaysia aims to become 'East Harvard' of the world

The Othman Yeop Abdullah Graduate Business School of Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) has its goals set to becoming one of the world's top 100. The university also targets to be within the top 300 universities worldwide by 2020.

Targets were within reach, according to the UUM vice-chancellor Prof. Datuk Dr Mohamded Mustafa Ishak. Based on the webometrics data on 24 January, UUM's global ranking improved to 1,652 from 2,214 last year. "This is a big achievement for the university as we manage to improve our rank in the span of a year. We also aim to be among the top 300 and 500 universities worldwide, top 50 in Asia, top 25 in Southeast Asia and top five in Malaysia university ranking," he said in his speech at the launch of UUM's 30th anniversary celebration yesterday.

UUM, the sixth public university in the country, was officially opened on Feb 16, 1984, and to date, had churned out more than 103,152 graduates.

Mohamed said UUM was also giving priority in consistently improving its teaching method to transform the students' learning process. He also announced UUM had emerged as the first local public university to carry out case studies and implementing improvement on teaching methods for its postgraduate programmes, based on the system practised in Harvard and Stanford universities.