The world’s best schools to make your Asian parents’ dreams come true

02 Mar 2018

Asian parents think highly about university. Education is the key towards success and which parent wouldn’t wish that for their children?

But not every university is created equal. And for Asian parents, not every subject will make their sons and daughters triumph in life through the promise of a stable and relatively high income.

Thus, if you had grown up in a Malaysian household, you would have heard these four subjects touted as the best degrees for their children to enrol in: Medicine, Law, Business and Engineering

Yup, just these four. Forget about theology or drama studies or taking a gap year – they’re not appearing in any list of subjects endorsed by this set of parents anytime soon.

‘How are you going to survive with an actor’s pay, my child?’ Source: Shutterstock

Your parents mean well, though they may have come from a generation that did not value personal happiness as highly as we did.

So, if you have an insatiable need to please your parents (like I did) or if you are genuinely passionate about these subjects, here are four tables ranking the world’s top 10 best universities according to subject together with a link to the full table at the end of each:

Medicine

No	Institution	Country
1	Harvard University	US
2	Oxford University	UK
3	Cambridge University	UK
4	Stanford University	US
5	Johns Hopkins University	US
6	Karolinska Institute	Sweden
7	University of California, Los Angeles	US
8	Yale University	US
9	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	US
10	University College London	UK

Source: QS World University Rankings 2018 – Medicine

Law

No	Institution	Country
1	Harvard University	US
2	Cambridge University	UK
3	Oxford University	UK
4	Yale University	US
5	Stanford University	US
6	New York University	US
7	University of California, Berkeley	US
8	The University of Melbourne	Australia
9	London School of Economics and Political Science	UK
10	Columbia University	US

Source: QS World University Rankings 2018 – Law

Business & Management

No	Institution	Country
1	Harvard University	US
2	INSEAD	France
3	London Business School	UK
4	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	US
5	University of Pennsylvania	US
6	Stanford University	US
7	University of Cambridge	UK
8	University of Oxford	UK
9	London School of Economics and Political Science	UK
10	Bocconi University	Italy

Source: QS World University Rankings 2018 – Business & Management

Engineering – Electrical & Electronic

No	Institution	Country
1	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	US
2	Stanford University	US
3	University of California, Berkeley	US
4	University of Cambridge	UK
5	Imperial College London	UK
6	Harvard University	US
7	University of Oxford	UK
8	Tsinghua University	China
9	University of California, Los Angeles	US
10	National University of Singapore	Singapore

Source: QS World University Rankings 2018 – Electrical & Electronic

QS ranked 48 subjects using four sources: Academic reputation, Employer reputation, Research citations per paper and H-index (productivity and impact of the published work of a scientist or scholar).