CHARACTERIZATION OF LATIN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES IN THE TOP10 OF THE QS WORLD UNIVERSITY RANKINGS 2021 ACCORDING TO THE METRICS FOR THE PERIOD 2018 – 2021

Abstract

The QS World University Rankings® annually produces a ranking of world universities based on six metrics that reflect the quality of academic and research activities, among other purposes, in order to evaluate university performance. The objective of this paper is to characterize (through a descriptive analysis) the Latin American universities in the Top10 of the QS World University Rankings® 2021, in order to relate and compare their metrics in the period 2018 - 2021. First, information on the ranking metrics in the considered period is presented and, then, the results of both the Overall Score indicator and the metrics are shown: Academic Reputation, Employer Reputation, Faculty Student, Citations per Faculty, International Faculty, and International Students. Regarding the 70% of the weights of the metrics, it stands out that the indicator OS and AR. The UBA (Argentina) and the UNAM (Mexico) remain as the universities with the highest annual values during the four years and, therefore, they are located in the first position. UC (Chile) and UBA (Argentina) have the highest average values in the ER metric. The two Brazilian universities (USP and UNICAMP) occupy the first two places in the CF metric.