Could Latin American universities do better in rankings?

When the Academic Ranking of World Universities – alias Shanghai Ranking – was published last month I did as always: checked the position of Latin American universities to see if anything had changed.

But there were no surprises: no Latin American university was among the best in the world. As usual, the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, came first in the continent but was only in position 151-200 among 1,000 universities surveyed.

The performance of national universities in international rankings is widely reported in the region’s local newspapers and has great impact among the general public, the universities themselves and the governments.

This great visibility of the rankings prompted me to ask a few Latin American experts why Latin American universities, in general, lagged in world rankings and why Brazilian universities were the best.

All the experts concurred that the criteria used in international university rankings apply to universities geared to research, teaching and outreach, but that the indicators they use are not suited for most Latin American universities.

María Pita, director of institutional quality at Argentina’s Austral University, put it this way: “Universities are complex organisations with their own histories, traditions, missions and objectives. This makes it difficult to have one single definition of quality.”

Most international rankings measure a few indicators, taking ‘world-class universities’ as their model, she says. They favour research over other functions such as teaching and outreach as well as certain disciplines such as hard, medical or natural sciences over others such as the arts, social science, engineering and education.

For Latin American universities, adds Pita, this “hegemonic model” of international rankings leaves out essential functions such as their social roles which include contributing to the territorial, cultural and economic development of the countries of the region and to the formation of future leaders.

Mario Rueda, director of the Research Institute on University and Education at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), says that the inherent difficulty of devising an assessment system appropriate for judging institutions is far greater in the case of international assessment systems.

“The latter attempt to use universal indicators but these are generally unable to show all the wealth of diverse types of institutions from different countries whose purposes and conditions are hardly comparable,” Rueda says.

He adds that, for the most part, Latin American higher education institutions answer to broader social expectations – social mobility, support of excluded populations, contribution to regional development, etc – and receive little financial support from governments.

Simon Schwartzman, one of the most distinguished Brazilian social scientists and author of many studies on education, says that Latin American universities do not perform well in international rankings for three reasons:

• • These rankings are strongly biased in favour of research, and very few Latin American higher education institutions are research-intensive.
  
  
• • Rankings are influenced by international reputation in the English-speaking international community, and most Latin American institutions are inward looking, and are not well known beyond their countries and localities.
  
  
• • In terms of quality, in the broad sense, most large institutions in the region may have good departments and professional schools but tend to be very uneven internally.

Claudia Costin, director of the reputed Centre for Excellence and Innovation in Education Policies of Getulio Vargas Foundation in Brazil, made an interesting observation in an interview with CNN on 20 August. She told the US news channel that, in her view, few Latin American universities perform well in international rankings due to the poor quality of primary and secondary education in the countries of the region.

She backed her statement by referring to the poor showing of Latin American countries in science, mathematics and reading in this year’s OECD international student assessment, known as PISA.

Francisco Marmolejo, lead of the Global Solutions Group on Tertiary Education at the World Bank Group, has a very specific opinion on why Latin American universities hardly figure in international rankings, saying that when rankings measure ‘prestige’, Latin American universities are not well known among academics surveyed.

Shortcomings

There was also agreement among the Latin American experts interviewed by University World News that, as with all assessments intent on measuring quality, international rankings have their shortcomings.

“There are important, legitimate questions raised about the reliability of international rankings, especially their methodology, which is why they can by no means be considered as the ‘absolute truth’ in respect to higher education institutions, not only in Latin America but also at the global level,” Marmolejo told University World News.

Felipe Martínez Rizo of the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes in Mexico supports Marmolejo’s view. After analysing the characteristics of the Shanghai and Times Higher Education ranking indexes and contrasting them with that of the German Centre for Higher Education, Martínez concluded that “no methodology will be able to properly evaluate, using just a few dimensions, institutions whose quality in a general sense is eminently multidimensional.”

He maintains that it would be more feasible to assess teaching units, functions or aspects of a university whose quality can be reasonably defined as unidimensional.

Why some Latin American universities do better

My second question was why the Brazilian University of Sao Paulo, plus several other Brazilian universities and Mexico’s UNAM stand out in international rankings.

Marmolejo says that the Latin American universities that “sneak into the rankings” are good universities in terms of quality. He mentions the University of Sao Paulo and UNAM.

“Naturally because they are prestigious, their student admission is highly selective. Also, due to their mission and history, they have a good research infrastructure, important scientific output and a high number of their teachers with PhDs,” he says.

Schwartzman speaks of his country, Brazil, which has “by far the largest graduate education system in the region and also the most up to date system of university research”.

“Graduate education and research are concentrated in a few universities. The University of Sao Paulo is the largest on both counts and the University of Campinas the most research-intensive in relative terms,” he says.

“Both are selective and well-financed, with all their academic staff having at least a PhD and full-time contracts. This is not the case with most universities in other Latin American countries”.

Costin’s perspective is that some Brazilian universities outperform others in the region because Brazil developed its great research capacity over many years; consequently, many of its universities do quality research.

She refers to Brazil’s investment in free public education, which shows up in the country’s great achievements in science. She points out, however, that the humanities are “Brazil’s Achilles’ heel”, adding that the huge South American country “has work to do in linking research more to the country’s development needs, especially social ones”.

How to improve in rankings?

When I asked the specialists I approached what Latin American universities should do to improve their performance in international rankings, the reply, in a few words, was that they shouldn’t bother.

“Various institutions, in many countries, have fallen into the trap of having climbing in the rankings as their prime objective,” says Marmolejo. “While I do not dismiss the worthiness of the rankings as a reference point, I must point out that defining institutional or country policies with the goal of obtaining a better position in them is neither healthy nor recommended.”

He says rankings are a unilateral definition about the quality of institutions of those that create them – in some cases mainly for commercial aims. He warns that seeking a good position per se may lead to decisions that favour some programmes over others that are equally important but that do not have the same visibility in the rankings.

“The search for an excessive selectivity as a synonym of prestige may result in limiting access to students from less favoured sectors of society or privileging certain types of activities such as publishing in indexed journals in certain areas of knowledge, and paying less attention to relevant work such as community service programmes.

“Instead of worrying about having a better position in international rankings, I believe it is important for universities to ask themselves how to improve what they do and make their teaching, research and community service functions more relevant,” he says.

Schwartzman says Latin American universities can always improve, making better use of resources and investing more in research. But on the other hand, the rankings could also perfect and broaden their criteria and methodology.

“For instance, institutions mostly concerned with providing professional degrees to students coming from lower socio-economic backgrounds with few resources may be doing good work but will never come up in international rankings based on research and reputation in the English-speaking world.”

Pita reiterates that the response of Latin American universities to what society demands from them is quite different from that of ‘world-class universities’. “This leads to questioning the rankings as adequate instruments for valuing the quality of universities.”

Like Schwartzman, Pita also recommends those in charge of international indexes should review how they are constructed and the methodologies they use so as to improve them and make them more meaningful for a larger group of universities.