Within the global higher education structure, many nations have followed various strategies to become one of popular destinations for international students. Similarly, employing national strategy focusing on internationalisation, Turkey achieved to become an emerging regional hub as the tenth most popular destination for international students. Then, as its new national goal, Turkey recently announced ranking targets at the end of 2019 to have universities in the global top 100 until 2023. Therefore, Turkey’s national targets present a suitable case to determine the areas of priority that are need for development and improvement in selected universities by comparing the input-output status of Turkish universities with its international competitors. Benefitting from their ranking scores and website reports, financial and human resources and scientific performance of designated universities were compared to be able to evaluate the attainability of these challenging ranking goals. The results revealed that although financial power is critical for examined universities, without talented research-workforce no chance to seriously improve ranking performance for any university. Considering its mid-profile to attract well-known international researchers, it seems Turkey as well as other emerging economies have to raise their own stars. Possible recommendations were then discussed to expedite universities’ ranking performance.