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“In the midst of the turbulence over financing, the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) recovers first place in Latin America”, is the title of the Argentine chapter by the British consulting firm Quacquarelli Symonds with the publication of the results of the prestigious global chart QS World University Ranking. In this evaluation, The UBA was ranked 71st among some 1,500 higher education institutions evaluated. According to the report, its rise is due to the fact that it led in six of the QS indicators: academic and employer reputation, proportion of international teaching staff, international research network, employment results and sustainability, climbing 24 positions compared to last year.
“The QS World University Ranking 2025 crowns the UBA as the best university in Latin America, displacing last year’s regional leader, the Universidade de São Paulo, and the second place, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM),” the document states. As detailed, the UBA had held first place for eight consecutive years until the last edition, when it fell to 95th place, and was no longer the best positioned in Latin America, at the hands of the University of San Pablo. This time in the ranking she rose again and was ranked 71st best in the world. She is the only Argentine who was among the 100 best in the world.
The United States is the most represented country in the monitoring, with 197 universities classified, followed by the United Kingdom with 90 and China (mainland) with 71. There were 25 Argentine universities classified: the one that follows the UBA in the ranking is the University Católica Argentina (UCA), which rose 33 places in its classification.
Of the 25 Argentinian companies positioned, five rose in the ranking and eight fell, while twelve remain stable in their rank or band, the report states. Among those that improved their classification is the Universidad Católica Argentina (UCA), was ranked 481, and is among the best 500 in the world.
Worldwide, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) It has been at the top of the rankings for thirteen consecutive years. He Imperial College London ranked second. The universities of Oxford and Harvard remain in positions three and four respectively, while Cambridge was placed fifth. Caltech (USA, in tenth place) is the only university to break into the world’s top ten for the first time. Switzerland and Singapore are the only countries other than the United Kingdom and the United States to feature in the top 10, with ETH Zurich and the National University of Singapore (NUS) in seventh and eighth place respectively.
Ben Sowter, senior vice president of QS highlighted the rise of UBA: “UBA shines in this year’s ranking, regaining first place in Latin America after a brief hiatus. However, Its success highlights the serious situation in which the other universities in the country find themselves, since the second best ranked university is 410 places behind. Although Argentina has remained relatively stable in this edition of the classification, registering an overall decline rate of 12%, the future of its university training system seems precarious. Recent mass protests against government funding cuts and austerity measures underline the social and historical importance of Argentine public universities”, he points out.
“We are very proud of the results achieved in this year’s QS ranking, which paradoxically occur at a complex time for public university education in our country. However, it must be clarified that these numbers reflect data corresponding to 2023. That is precisely the challenge we face today. If we want to maintain these levels of excellence, it is essential that investment is also sustained in different strategic areas such as science and research, for example. At this time, the budget assigned to this area is absolutely outdated. To cite just one case, the Cero+Infinito building at Ciudad Universitaria, which is a state-of-the-art research center, is experiencing basic operational problems due to lack of funds. The same happens with the salaries of researchers, teachers and non-teachers at our university. If this is not reversed, sooner or later we will fall into these measurements that put us in the elite of the international university system. One of the driving ideas with which we called for the great march on April 23 was ‘Let’s take care of what works’, and that is more than clear today in the face of these results and the look that we must have towards the future.”, said Emiliano Yacobitti, vice-rector of the UBA.
Thanks to the improvement in the employability of its graduates and the proportion of its teaching resources per students, as highlighted in the report, the UCA slipped into the top 500 in the world, news that was very well received in that house of higher education. “For the sixth consecutive year we improved our position in the international QS ranking, occupying first place among private universities. Students choose us for the academic quality, for the comprehensive humanistic training they receive, for the new careers we offer, and for the positive assessment that employers have for our graduates both locally and internationally,” said Miguel Ángel Schiavone, rector of the UCA.
Other points highlighted by the report: “Argentina registers a significant increase in the employment rate of graduates, which suggests high-quality education and good preparation for work”. It is also indicated that there are “struggles in research-related indicators, both in terms of impact and cross-border collaboration.” In addition, it is highlighted that it is among the most diverse student cohorts in Latin America, but it also points out that it registers a general decrease in the rate of international students.
From the UCA, the report highlights that it rose 33 positions thanks to improvements in the employability of graduates and teaching resources. “Its teacher/student ratio is the best in Argentina and excels in any individual indicator in the country, ranking 19th worldwide, the second highest in Latin America,” the report highlights.
At the level of the Argentine university system, the report points out that our country shows unequal results in metrics related to employability. In the item, “employer reputation”, 88% of its universities have fallen in the table. By contrast, 76% of its universities have improved employment results. “This suggests that Argentine universities produce work-ready graduates who have a positive impact on their respective careers, although this has not yet been fully reflected in the perception of the broader employer community”, details the report.
“Research continues to be a challenge for Argentine universities,” the report reads. “All have fallen in the table of research impact based on the number of citations per faculty, and none are among the top 1,000 research universities in the world. Likewise, Argentina has experienced a decrease in cross-border collaboration in research, with 68% of its universities falling into the International Research Network,” it is indicated.
QS Quacquarelli Symonds is the world’s leading provider of services, analytics and insights to the higher education sector. The ranking, which it has prepared since 2004, is the most popular source of comparative data on university performance in the world. Last April, another ranking prepared by the same consulting firm was released, but unlike this one, which evaluates universities comprehensively, that one measured reputations by areas of knowledge or careers. There, of the ten best-ranked programs in Argentine universities, nine belong to the areas of arts and humanities and social sciences. Eight of them are dictated by the UBA. The best classified in the country, modern languages, corresponds to that public institution and is in 21st place worldwide.
