Authors - VanVinh Le, HongGiang Nguyen Abstract - This study aims to use the 2025 Times Higher Education (THE) Asia University Rankings as a frame of reference to consider what drives and dictates university rankings in the ASEAN region. Their analysis looks at six major indicators – Teaching, Research, Citations, Industry Income, International Outlook and Rank.. Comparative analysis confirmed that while Vietnam universities are purely citation-dependent in their quest to enhance higher ranked tables, some universities of our Southeast Asian neighbors at least start from a more balanced and diverse evaluation. The study deployed three deep learning models BiLSTM, BiGRU, and a Hybrid BiGRU-BiLSTM to predict university rankings. Among all the models, the Hybrid model performed the best with the lowest RMSE (3.72) and MAE (2.61), which indicated the highest predictive accuracy and stability. The analysis additionally showed the power of higher citation scores to boost rankings, with the greatest gains accruing to institutions with the lowest ranking. Feature importance analysis indicated that collaboration between industry and research is very important for ASEAN universities. Quality of teaching was still a main focus in Vietnam universities. The results highlight the role of research impact and international collaboration to go up in ranking. The analysis cautioned that universities and colleges looking to secure their position on the world stage needed to prioritize the volume of research produced, degree of international engagement, and depth of industry collaboration. The findings guaranteed the suitability of deep learning models as a robust methodological toolbox for ranking prediction and data-driven strategic improvement of university performance.
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