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Weekly Report - 06 October 2011 (WR-11-40)

Brazil and Chile excel in first university league table

Chile’s President Sebastián Piñera will have derived bitter satisfaction from the publication of the first ever Latin American University Rankings this week. The Piñera administration has been pushed firmly on to the back foot by months of student protests in Chile, but the new league table shows that Chile is setting the benchmark for a country of its size for higher education standards. Brazil also performed impressively with nearly one-third of the top 200 universities in the region.

Top of the heap was the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), followed by the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC), one of the top five universities in the Spanish-speaking world. Brazil and Chile also shared third and fourth place respectively in the table with the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) and the Universidad de Chile. Overall Brazil took 65 of the top 200 universities in the region, almost twice the number of Mexico, which had 35 in the top 200, headed by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in fifth and the Tecnológico de Monterrey (ITESM) in seventh. Chile and Argentina had 25 universities apiece in the top 200.

The only country outside of these four with a university appearing in the top 30 was Colombia: Universidad Nacional de Colombia (8); Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (23) and Universidad de Antioquia (27). The next country to feature is Venezuela with the Universidad Simón Bolívar (32) and then Peru’s Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (34). In the world ranking list released shortly beforehand, only five Latin American universities made it into the top 200, led by the USP, as low as 169th.

The table was prepared by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), a London-based company specialising in education and study abroad. The assessment methodology included seven criteria: academic reputation; employer reputation; papers per faculty; citations per paper; the student faculty ratio; staff with PHD; and web impact. QS argued that Brazil was reaping the dividends of substantial and sustained investment in education over the last decade under the Lula administration - university enrolment has tripled over this period - which will be key to driving the country’s development in the years to come.

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