University rankings mean a lot to people, but none more so than Asian parents.No matter how old you are or where you’re from, everyone is impressed when you say you went to the best-ranked universities in the world.
An Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student? Doesn’t matter if it’s for Computer Science and Engineering course or the less popular Anthropology programme – it’s still the undisputed number one university in the world.
Joined the University of Oxford summer school? Who cares if it wasn’t for an entire degree? Everyone knows that an institution as reputable as Oxford only accepts the best into its ranks.
Got a certification from an online course offered by ETH Zurich? Sure, everyone has access to it, but surely only the smartest people can actually complete the programme in the first place.
You get the idea – and you might especially get it if your Asian parents have been hell-bent on making sure you get into a uni at the top of university rankings.
The joke goes something like, “You might think you’re smart, but there’s a kid somewhere in China who has already achieved more than you.” Source: AFP
The Asian definition of success: How it came to be and why it matters
Many factors go into why we choose the universities and programmes we do.
Whether it’s to pursue a subject interest or to chase a dream job, or maybe you were struck by inspiration by a person or a cause, anything and everything can influence your decision.
And of course, there’s no influence like parental influence.
We’ve talked about what success looks like for an Asian before, but here’s the recap: get excellent grades, enrol into programmes in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) with a high preference for the top-ranked universities, which later guarantees you a high-paying job down the line.
A big part of this definition is shaped by what was ingrained in Asian kids by their parents.
For many, especially first-generation Asians born outside of Asia, this ideology is simply a matter of survival. Because if you don’t end up in one of those ideal careers that your parents put on a pedestal, the only other option is a heartbreaking one.
“It’s not just that we have failed to climb the social and economic ladder, bridging the gap between minimum-wage immigrant and highly educated, white collar, respected member of society in a single generation – it’s also because we have wasted all the time, money and sacrifice that was spent to get us there,” writes Jess Ho on The Age in an article titled “As a child of immigrants, my choice was clear: be a doctor or be a disappointment.”
One Redditor puts it simply: “The Asian cultures are focused on parents. It is focused on children being successful and stable, so that they can then be a strong foundation for elderly parents in the future. The concept that you have to make your parents happy comes from actually having to make an entire society happy.”
“Half of these parents don’t even know what they want themselves, but they just have been brainwashed with what they have been hearing in their own homes for generations upon generations.”
As famous as Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay is, you might not have time to stop and smell the flowers if you’re too busy competing with your fellow students for good academic results. Source: AFP
But what about the Asian parents who’ve always remained in their countries or origins?
At the end of 2024, an article from The Independent revealed how a Singaporean, who failed to secure a spot in a local junior college, had his parents tell him: “You will have no future, and you won’t be able to support us after all that we have done for you.”
Not only that, in an attempt to punish him for his supposed failure, he was ignored for two weeks, made to work part-time, and was even restricted from being home during certain periods of the day.
“That same month, my dad told me that he would kick me out once I graduate [from polytechnic] if I didn’t get into NTU (Nanyang Technological University) or NUS (National University of Singapore,” he added.
NUS, Asia’s best university and ranked #8 on the QS World University Rankings (WUR) 2025, received over 7,000 applications from prospective students for the class of 2026. Out of these, only about 400 candidates secured an admission offer from the university, reports news portal Shiksha.
NTU, on the other hand, follows close behind in rankings. It’s Asia’s third-best university, trailing at #15 on the QS WUR 2025, right behind China’s titan, Peking University. According to Shiska, NTU’s 2024 acceptance rate was 47% – so that’s almost a coin toss.
Another example, which also comes from Singapore, is much worse.
One Redditor shared that they got slapped across the dinner table for choosing NTU over NUS, especially after their parents have told all their friends that the poster would be going to the number one university in Asia.
“[My parents are] telling me I’m insensible, naive, and inexperienced, and that I won’t be successful if I go NTU,” wrote the user. “Telling me I’m a disappointment. Telling me they won’t fund my university if I choose NTU. That NTU was for NUS rejects.”
“I’m not sure what to do: succumb to my parents’ old-fashioned wishes and blame them through adulthood, or follow my heart in fear of their impending ‘I told you so’ each time I encounter failure in the future.”
Naturally, these are pretty extreme examples of the lengths Asian parents would go to to ensure their child – and perhaps themselves by extension – the best possible future.
Not all parents are like that, and as much as it might pain you to read this, there’s rhyme to their reason.
There’s a lot of good and bad about choosing a school based on its university rankings, but as much as you might hate to admit it, your parents were right about one thing — the opportunities are really good. Source: AFP
Why your Asian parents are right about most things
A 2022 report from Goldman Sachs Research revealed that Asian Americans were the most highly educated group in the US and have had marked success in income and innovation.
Despite only accounting for 6% of the population, Asian Americans represent 13% of STEM jobs and were behind 19% of high-impact patents. Since 1980, they’ve won one out of 10 Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry, and were over-represented in fast-growing industries like information, corporate management, and professional technical services.
Adding to that, the household median income for Asian Americans was US$101,418 in 2021 – 43% greater than the national median income of US$70,784, according to Pew Research.
Asian Americans also have a higher rate of attaining graduate degrees, especially in programmes that lead to jobs with higher pay, like business, biological and biomedical sciences and health professions.
The US Bureau of Labour Statistics reports that Asian Americans have the lowest unemployment rate of any non-White demographic. In May 2022, that was 2.4% – lower even than the White unemployment rate at that time and far below the national average of 3.6%.
Outside of the US, it’s a similar story too.
- A Joint Autonomous Universities Graduate Employment Survey 2024 found that NUS graduates continue to earn higher starting salaries and achieve strong employment rates. Close to nine in 10 NUS fresh graduates in the labour force were employed within six months after final exams.
- The University of Hong Kong, Asia’s fourth-best university with a global ranking of #17 on QS, reported a graduate employment rate of 98.8% in 2023. They also reported that the monthly gross salary earned by their graduates averaged 31,982 Hong Kong dollars (US$4,085), as compared to the HK$25,000 (US$3,193) median.
- The Department of Electrical Engineering and Applied Electronics at Tsinghua University, Asia’s fifth-best university and ranked #20 globally on QS, shared that in 2023, they saw a 100% employment rate for their master’s graduates and a 93.9% employment rate for their undergraduates. The remaining 6.1% had plans to continue their studies and had not been employed.
So, clearly, your parents have the right idea about looking at university rankings and pushing their kids into these institutions and their programmes.
Don’t be too caught up in the university rankings — there’s more to it than meets the eye. Source: AFP
Why university rankings don’t actually matter
Despite all that, the many internationally recognised university rankings are beginning to lose their hold on the public and the universities themselves.
In November 2022, Yale University and Harvard University announced that their law schools would no longer be included in the US News and World Report rankings – a prominent list in the US.
Their reason? There had been persistent criticism about how the university rankings were calculated, and this suggested that the results misled students about what the school could offer. Since then, other schools, like Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, University of Washington School of Medicine, and the entirety of Columbia University have done the same.
And while the US News and World Report have revised its calculations, the damage to the perception of university rankings has been done.
In an interview with Intelligencer, Colin Diver, a former University of Pennsylvania law school dean, shares the rise and fall of these rankings clearly: “The rankings started to provide a very visible, prominent measure of the performance of our law school and all of our competitors’ law schools. Applicants became very, very finely attuned to the rankings. Our alumni became almost obsessed with them, and I also noticed that the behaviour of law-school administrators changed.”
But then things started to not add up.
“Some of our competitors started to reduce the size of their first-year entering class so as to be able to further raise their average LSAT scores and the average college GPAs of their entering students,” says Diver in the interview. “And then I would hear about misreporting, or fudging, or massaging of data. I would hear about schools that reported 99% placement success in years when I knew that that was impossible.”
As many Asian parents like to say, if you don’t succeed, you’ll end up being a garbage collector. To that, we say that that’s a really important career too. Source: AFP
Unintentionally (or intentionally) misleading students aside, excellent university rankings don’t necessarily mean great graduates.
Case in point: in 2024, several Malaysian universities rose in international university rankings, but employers found that many graduates lacked the soft skills required by the job market, reported the Malaysian Employers Federation.
In the US, the gap between graduates from Ivy League universities and other public and private universities is shrinking too.
Four in 10 respondents of a Forbes survey on hiring strategies said that Ivy League schools are doing a worse job at preparing entry-level job candidates than they were five years ago while 42% percent of employers said public colleges were doing a better job at preparing entry-level job candidates than they were in the same time frame.
To seal the deal, MBAs are starting to see lower and lower returns on investments.
What was once lauded as the business degree to launch your career is now seeing graduates struggling to find jobs.
The Economist reported that MBA grads from the MIT Sloan School of Management – ranked #2 for Business and Management Studies on the QS WUR by Subject – used to see an average 82% of its students searching for a job had accepted one at graduation, and 93% had done so three months later back in 2022. In 2024, those figures were 62% and 77%, respectively.
Ultimately, university rankings can only show you a (possibly distorted) glimpse of what the school has to offer, but it isn’t all that is available on the table too.
So, before you look up all those university rankings sites, ask yourself this: if rankings didn’t exist, what would you want from your prospective university and programme?
