Three days at the QS Higher Ed Summit: Asia Pacific 2026, held in Bali from 3 to 5 November, offered a view of higher education from the other side of the lecture hall. One thing became clear: Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), best known for its QS rankings, has made higher education its business. It does not teach students or award degrees. Instead, it works around the institutions that do, through rankings, data, events and reputation services. QS has found its niche, and rankings sit near the centre of that business.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Every industry has its supporting businesses, and universities need information about how they perform and how others perceive them. But once rankings become a business, we should ask a question that is easy to avoid: why are we so eager to join the bandwagon?

For Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), the answer is not difficult. QS rankings have been useful in attracting prospective international students, particularly postgraduate research students. A ranking can make a university visible to someone considering a degree in another country. It can provide a first point of comparison, a reason to click, perhaps even a reason to send an enquiry. In that sense, rankings are not decoration. They can open a door.

The trouble begins when we mistake the door for the destination.

The panel discussions reinforced one clear view: a university should not allow rankings to devise its strategy. A ranking should not trigger its direction, determine what its brand means, or become the reason it exists in public. To put it bluntly, ‘make us rank higher’ is not a branding strategy. It is a target borrowed from a scoreboard.

The problem is partly practical. A university can improve its research environment, strengthen teaching, build international partnerships and give students a better campus experience. Those are real actions. But its position in a ranking depends not only on what it achieves. It also depends on what other universities achieve during the same period, under the same criteria. The table is comparative by design. Your effort may rise while your position stays still, because someone else has moved faster.

So what does it mean to set a target such as ‘number 10 in the world’? How much should we spend to get there? Which activities deserve more resources? What should a faculty put in its key performance indicator (KPI)? Unless we know what our competitors are doing, and how the measures will respond, are we planning or guessing? We can commit resources to improve the things that matter. We cannot responsibly budget against an opponent’s unknown next move and call that a strategy.

This does not make rankings useless. It tells us what job they should do. Rankings can be a benchmark: a signal of how competitive we are, a prompt to examine the distance between our performance and that of our peers. They can help us notice where we are strong, where we are slipping and where our assumptions about our standing may be wrong. A signal deserves attention. It should not be mistaken for a compass.

Rankings also offer a useful framework for thinking about data. Behind the final position are indicators tied to university work: research performance, citations, international engagement, employability and learning experience. These measures can help us inspect institutional health. Are research outputs improving in quality? Are partnerships producing meaningful work? Do students find the campus supportive? Are we translating knowledge into value for society? These are better questions than asking only whether our number has changed.

Perhaps the harder question is this: if institutional health is what we really care about, should a dashboard that shows that health replace the ranking table?

Not entirely. A dashboard cannot tell us how the outside world compares us, and an external ranking can help an international audience navigate a crowded field. But a dashboard could give the university something a ranking cannot: a more immediate, more controllable picture of whether our work is getting stronger. It could track the conditions that produce reputation, rather than treating reputation as the work itself.

That distinction matters. Reputation is earned through what a university does and what people experience. Rankings can record part of that story, but they are not the story. If we build our brand around the pursuit of a higher position, we risk teaching the institution to perform for the measure. If we build a university that is genuinely better at research, teaching, engagement and student life, the measure may eventually notice. It may not notice at once. It may never place us exactly where we hoped. That does not make the work less valuable.

The summit in Bali did not justify dismissing rankings. Instead, it reinforced the need to put them in their proper place. Use them to compare, question and learn. Use their data to examine the institution. But do not give them authority to decide what it should become. The university must choose its direction. A ranking can show how the race looks from outside. It cannot tell us whether we are running toward the right future.