electronic publishing

ENGINEERING BULLETIN

Publisher: All-Russian public organization "Academy of Engineering Sciences named after A.M. Prokhorov".

LATIN AMERICA: University Rankings Take Root in Latin America

The growing influence of university rankings has reached Latin America, with governments, news media, and private researchers drawing up domestic versions that they say are important for the institutions and students alike.

Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru each have at least one national ranking. Some were first published in recent months, and all use different approaches to evaluate their higher-education institutions.

A few, such as in Chile, are produced by news-media companies. Others, as in Colombia, were carried out by independent researchers. And some, like Brazil, are not so much rankings as government-sanctioned ratings.

Whatever their origin, they all serve a purpose that goes beyond boasting or one-upmanship, experts say. The rankings put pressure on lagging universities to up their game, and they give government officials, students, and parents a useful yardstick.

"Global rankings are very important. But there are close to 15,000 higher-education institutions in the world, and the global ranking deals with only 400, 500 of them," says Kazimierz Bilanow, managing director of the Warsaw-based International Observatory on Academic Rankings and Excellence. "There are millions and millions of students who never think of going to Harvard. But they want to go to university and get an education, so they look at their own country. National rankings give them some guidance."

Full text of the article - on The Chronicle of Higher Education website
Photo: Carlos-Roberto Peña-Barrera, a researcher in Colombia  (The Chrinicle of Higher Education)