The world's best schools to make your Asian parents' dreams come true
What do you think she graduated in? Source: Shutterstock

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).

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