According to a ranking developed by the University of Shanghai, the University of Sao Paulo, University of Buenos Aires, National Autonomous University of Mexico and Catholic University of Chile stand out due to their academic level.  

According to the ranking developed by the University of Shanghai, only ten Latin American universities are among the top 500 universities of the world.

The University of Sao Paulo is the only one in the region among the top 150. The University of Buenos Aires the second best Spanish speaking university, right after the University of Barcelona. It is also in the second place in Latin America, following the University of Sao Paulo.

“It is rather difficult to put in numbers the complex task of teaching, producing knowledge and developing university extension”, stated the rector of the University of Buenos Aires, Alberto Barbieri.

The category going from 151 to 200, among which is the University of Buenos Aires, includes major universities from all around the world, such as the Sapieza, (of Rome), Tokyo Institute of Technology, University of Hamburg, University of Miami and University of Vienna.

The first three places belong to three American universities: Harvard University, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Shanghai Ranking (Academic Ranking of World Universities – ARWU) was created in 2003 by the Chinese university system and ranks over 1200 universities per year.

The parameters used to classify the institutions are: amount of students and teachers who have won Nobel prizes and Fields medals; number of highly quoted researchers; number of papers published in Nature and Science magazines; the number of papers in the Science Citation Index – Expanded (SCIE) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), -useful for validating scientific production-; and the result per capita regarding the size of the institution.

The original objective of creating ARWU was to know the positioning of superior education in China, compared to universities from the rest of the world. The accuracy applied to developing the ranking increased its’ prestige and nowadays it is followed by universities, governments and media from all over the world.

Source: La Nación