EXAMINING THE EFFICIENCY OF MALAYSIAN PUBLIC RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES IN SECURING WORLD UNIVERSITY RANKING

University ranking is crucial as it attracts prospective students and academics. The ranking of public research universities in Malaysia works as a catalyst for securing government and other corporate research funding. This study measures the technical efficiency of five public research universities in Malaysia (PRUMs). This study employs a triangular fuzzy number in the Banker, Charnes, and Cooper (BCC) Fuzzy Data Envelopment Analysis (BCC-FDEA) model. The three world ranking indicators employed as output variables are teaching and research reputations and citations, and the input variables are the number of full-time students and staff. Data gathered for the academic years from 2018/2019 to 2020/2021 are used to project the efficiency scores for 2021/2022. The BCC-FDEA model is also used to consider five public research universities in Asia (APRUs) as the decision-making units (DMUs) to solve the issue of sample size adequacy. This study projects three PRUMs as technically inefficient due to input factor issues. Two main contributions of this study are: (1) QS world ranking indicators are profound parameters that research universities should consider to attain a better position in the world ranking; (2) fuzzy efficiency scores shed light on how inefficient PRUMs can improve their operations by emulating their referent DMUs.