Asian universities have gained significant ground on their Western counterparts and could overtake them within two decades, but Indonesian universities are being left behind, according to the results of a survey released on Tuesday.
The QS University Rankings: Asia survey showed that the top five Indonesian universities have all lost ground on their regional rivals, with the overall standing of the archipelago's universities having waned significantly since 2009.
"In the years since the financial crisis Indonesian universities have struggled to match the rapid development seen in countries such as China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Korea," QS head of research Ben Sowter said.
Only University of Indonesia makes the top 100. The nation's top-ranked institution dropped to 64th in the table this year, from 59th in 2012. The university ranked 50th in each of the first three editions of the rankings, between 2009 and 2011.
Second-placed Bandung Institute of Technology also dropped for the second successive year, from 113rd to 129th, having been rated 80th-best in the 2009 list.
The best university in Asia, according to the survey, is the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), an honor the 22-year-old institution has held since 2011.
"There are already 17 percent more Asian universities in the top 200 of the world university rankings since the recession, and the next two decades could see leading US and European universities objectively overtaken," Nunzio Quacquarelli, managing director of QS, said.
While Singapore has reaped the benefits of high-profile research collaborations and partnership schemes through numerous foreign-branch campuses, Indonesian lawmakers have engaged themselves in a protracted debate over their legality. Indonesia's House of Representatives last July passed a higher-education bill allowing the entry of foreign universities, but regulations are yet to be finalized.
Asian universities featured in the global top 10 in 15 of the 30 disciplines covered in 2013 QS World University Rankings by Subject, published in May 2013. Nine of the top 20 institutions in civil engineering are Asian, compared to just five for the United States and the United Kingdom combined. Asia also shows a five-year surge in international students studying at ranked institutions in the region, from 175,286 in 2009 to 255,212 this year. Total international faculty has grown from 21,223 to 35,677.
"As Western governments struggle to maintain funding levels, Asian institutions have rapidly increased their ability to attract the world's best faculty and students," Sowter said. "As the cost of studying rises in North America and the United Kingdom, Asia is reversing the brain drain by investing in scholarships to attract top students from the West."