LATIN AMERICA boasts some giant universities and a few venerable ones: the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) enroll several hundred thousand students apiece, while Lima's San Marcos was founded in 1551. Even so, the region is hardly synonymous with excellence in higher education. Research output is unimpressive, teaching techniques are old-fashioned and students drop out in droves. These failings matter. Faster economic growth is driving a big rise in demand for higher education in the region and a large crop of new universities. Now, at last, comes an effort to assess the quality of Latin American higher education.
On October 4th Quacquarelli Symonds, an education consultancy, published the first regional ranking of Latin American universities, combining measures of reputation, research output, academics' qualifications and staff-student ratios. Of the 200 top universities, 65 are in Brazil, 35 in Mexico, 25 apiece in Argentina and Chile and 20 in Colombia (see table for the top ten). The University of São Paulo (USP), the richest and biggest university in Brazil's richest state, came top.
This week USP won another plaudit, becoming the only Latin American university to make it into the world's top 200 universities in another much-watched list, published by
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, a British specialist weekly. USP ranked 178th this year (up from 232nd last year). Founded and supported by the government of São Paulo state, USP's climb up the rankings has been helped by a big increase in private funding and in international collaborations and recognition. It also led the Latin American contingent in another list, this time compiled by Shanghai's Jiao Tong University and released in August, ranking in the cluster between 101st and 150th. This list focuses on scientific research; USP is becoming a world leader in tropical medicine, parasitology and biofuels.
Nowhere else in Latin America can match USP. The other leaders in the region are a mix of old-established public universities (the University of Chile, for example), Catholic institutions or secular non-profit places such as Bogotá's University of the Andes and Monterrey's Tecnológico.
University rankings miss hard-to-measure factors such as the quality of teaching and the campus atmosphere. They are biased towards bigger universities, which tend to be better known and to produce more research. (This may have helped Argentina's UBA, whose glory days are in the past.) But what they do capture matters. In their different ways they try to identify beacons of excellence and innovation. When they agree, as with USP's regional pre-eminence, it is worth taking note.
The World's Top Universities 2011
These regional rankings might also break down the insularity that has long been a mark of Latin American academia. “Across the region, good students are recruited to faculty at their own universities, rather than encouraged to leave and broaden their horizons, ” says Jamil Salmi, a higher-education specialist at the World Bank. “And there's a hostility to the very notion you might hire faculty from abroad.”
At many Latin American public universities students pay nothing, staff are unsackable, and the curriculum is old-fashioned and politicised. Good teaching and research are not rewarded with extra funding or promotions; institutions do not lose money if their students drop out. Except in Brazil many faculty members are part-timers without PhDs.
In the past three decades, governments have accepted a huge expansion of private provision, much of it by for-profit outfits. That has allowed them to expand higher education quickly without spending more, but before they decided what made a good university, says Francisco Marmolejo, a Mexican consultant on university administration. The result is that mechanisms to ensure quality are weak or nonexistent. Poor youngsters who attend the mainly awful state schools usually end up in these places, paying through the nose.
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No country in the region has worked out satisfactorily how to share the cost of degrees between students and taxpayers. Chile's government is currently suffering the consequences. Months of student protests against the exorbitant cost of for-profit universities have seen the popularity of the president, Sebastián Piñera, plunge. The country's education system, from primary school to university, is probably the region's best. But Chile also has one of world's lowest levels of public funding for higher education, some of the longest degrees and no comprehensive system of student grants or subsidised loans. When a flat jobs market was added to this mix, it became combustible.
In Venezuela Hugo Chávez's government has expanded higher education by forcing existing universities to accept a massive increase in student numbers, and by setting-up a giant new open-access state institution, the “Bolivarian University”. This is supposed eventually to have around 200 campuses. The result, says Mr Marmolejo, is a “time-bomb”. “Unprepared institutions; non-existent infrastructure; 300 students in classrooms that used to hold 15. You end up with a system where hundreds of thousands of people have degrees that are totally worthless.”
If Latin America's universities are to flourish their governance must be reformed, says Philip Altbach, director of the Centre for International Higher Education at Boston College in the United States. “In most countries the flagship public universities are simply too big to be managed, ” he says. Creating a world-class modern university needs flexibility in hiring, promotion and pay rather than the rigid rules that are traditional in the region.
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Stronger mechanisms to ensure quality and more equitable student financing would also make a big difference, says Andreas Schleicher of the OECD, an organisation of mainly rich countries. He is optimistic that USP's growing pre-eminence could show the way for the entire region. “No one in the United States tries to figure out what a great university is; they just look at the Ivy League, ” he says. “It's very important to have great institutions: they define success.”The debate about primary and secondary education is still raging in the U.S., with statistics backing up the sense that the system is failing too many students. One Department of Education study found that 30 million adults in the U.S. were functionally illiterate. Another Department of Ed report ranks the U.S. at 24 out of 65 countries for math proficiency among 15-year-olds.
But when it comes to higher education, the U.S. does better than any other country, according to the eighth annual ranking of the world’s top universities, put out by
, a London magazine that tracks the higher ed market. The 2011 World University Rankings are dominated by U.S. schools. They hold 75 spots among the top 200, up three schools since last year. Seven U.S. schools are in the top 10. The U.K. comes in a distant second, with 32 schools in the top 200 and three in the top 10. This year for the first time,
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’s rankings editor Phil Baty points out that the American system is robustly funded, with 2.7% of gross domestic product going to tertiary education. That’s more than any of the other developed countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and more than twice as high as the average.
Though larger schools tend to dominate the top of the rankings, a small school, California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, with just 2, 175 students, takes the number one spot this year, bumping Harvard from first to second place, where it ties with Stanford. CalTech’s focus on science and engineering attracts some top students and professors. Its faculty has won 32 Nobel prizes. Rankings editor Baty explains that Harvard did not decline, but rather, Cal Tech had a 16% increase in research income, which boosted it from second place last year.
Emphasizes global scholarship and reputation. “We look at the big picture, ” explains Baty. “What does Harvard contribute to the world?” (For a detailed explanation of
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, combed through 6 million journal articles published over a five-year period, and then calculated how many times those articles were cited by other scholars. Another 30% of the score comes from scrutiny of institutions’ research, in terms of volume, reputation, and income generated.
Also had a survey done of 17, 554 academics around the world, with questions about the best departments in their disciplines, specialists in their fields, and where they would recommend their graduates go for further study. “We think the best teaching takes place in a great research environment, ” says Braty.
One subtle change in this year’s ranking, says Braty: While private U.S. universities are doing well, large public universities are showing the strain of reduced funding. University of California at Berkeley slipped from No. 8 to No. 10 and UCLA from No. 11 to No. 13.
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Funding cuts and increased enrollments also hurt Ireland’s schools, which all fell sharply (Trinity College in Dublin, the top-ranked Irish school, tumbled from 76 to 117).
Other countries that placed schools in the top 200 include Germany and the Netherlands with 12 each (though none in the top 40), Canada with nine (the University of Toronto is No. 9) and Australia with seven. The top-ranked Asian university is the University of Tokyo, at No. 30, followed by University of Hong Kong at No. 34 and the National University of Singapore at No. 40. Peking University is the highest ranked school in China, at
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