The World University Rankings

The Times, 16th September 2010

The goals will come

By Phil Baty

Unlike their football teams, South America's universities have not made a global
splash. But Brazil looks likely to score some big successes soon.

The continent of South America does not have a single institution in the Times
Higher Education list of the worlds 200 top universities.

And those institutions most likely to break into the elite list, according to one expert,
are hampered by a number of obstacles in their climb to the top.

Latin America has several serious challenges on the road to developing world-
class universities, says Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International
Higher Education at Boston College, US.

The main contenders are the continents great public universities such as the
University of Buenos Aires. These are, however, saddled with cumbersome,
bureaucratic and sometimes politicised governance structures. They rely mainly on
part-time faculty and part-timers can never be the basis of a research university.
They are also under-funded and most are unable to charge tuition fees to their
students.

But there are undoubtedly bright spots, he says. Perhaps only in the Brazilian
state of So Paulo can there be world-class universities. Its two main universities
are staffed by full-time faculty who hold doctorates, and the universities have a
significant research mission and adequate funding from the state.

Indeed, the University of So Paulo was very close to making it into the table of the
top 200 institutions for 2010-11 as revealed in data from the Times Higher
Education World University Rankings iPhone application, which includes
information on more than 400 institutions.

The iPhone rankings app also reveals that the State University of Campinas and
So Paulo State University are also sitting just outside the top 200.

In his 2009 book The Challenge of Establishing World Class Universities, Jamil
Salmi, tertiary education coordinator at the World Bank, highlights both the
potential of and the challenges at the University of So Paulo.

It is the most selective institution in Brazil, he writes, and it has the highest number
of top-rated graduate programmes, and every year it produces more PhD
graduates than any US university.

But he laments: At the same time, its ability to manage its resources is
constrained by rigid civil service regulations, even though it is the richest university
in the country.

It has very few linkages with the international research community, and only 3 per
cent of its graduate students are from outside Brazil. The university is very inward-
looking.

Salmi tells THE that there have been many positive developments in the region. He
highlights the establishment of accreditation systems in most of its countries, and
the development of student loan systems in Brazil, Chile and Colombia.

However, he also outlines the challenges: low public investment in higher

education, hidebound governance structures, a paucity of international exchange
programmes and links, predominantly monolingual campus cultures and a lack of
long-term vision for the development of higher education.

But Andreas Schleicher, head of the indicators and analysis division at the
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Developments Directorate for
Education, says that for some countries in the region, there have been very
interesting recent developments that may soon have an impact on the Times
Higher Education World University Rankings.

While for most OECD countries spending per student has continued to rise since
2000, countries such as Brazil and Chile have seen much faster rises in
participation than [rises in] spending levels, he says.

Spending per student in Chile has dropped by 25 per cent and by 15 per cent in
Brazil and yet, the labour-market returns to higher education seem to be picking
up.

In Brazil, the earnings advantage of tertiary graduates over secondary school

graduates is now over 263 per cent, well above the figure for any OECD country.
The figure for the US, which is high by OECD standards, is 177 per cent.

It is hard to say to what extent supply or demand factors play into this, but these
data may suggest that quality is improving.

And the continent appears poised for a much greater profile in world-class
research in some key fields.

A Global Research Report on Brazil by Thomson Reuters, the data supplier for the
World University Rankings, identifies Brazil as a dominant force in a new pack of
Latin tigers including Mexico and Argentina.

The report says that Latin Americas share of the worlds scientific papers rose
from 1.7 per cent in 1990 to 4.8 per cent in 2008. In 1981, about 2,000 papers had
an author address in Brazil. In 2008, the figure was about 20,000.

The most striking feature of the new geography of science is the sheer scale of
investment and mobilisation of people behind innovation that is under way, driven
by a high-tech vision of how to succeed in the global economy, the Thomson
Reuters report says.

Brazil, which has a population of 190 million, spent 8.4 billion on research and
development in 2007: this equates to roughly 1 per cent of gross domestic product
well ahead of many European nations.

Each year, the country produces more than 500,000 new graduates and about
10,000 new PhD researchers, the report says, representing a 10-fold increase in
20 years.

It is in the life sciences that Brazil is most impressive.

Between 2003 and 2007, the country published about 85,000 papers, which
accounted for 1.83 per cent of all the papers published in journals indexed by
Thomson Reuters.

But Brazil accounts for almost 19 per cent of the global share of research papers in
tropical medicine, and more than 12 per cent of those in parasitology.

In its report, Thomson Reuters warns: Brazil is an increasingly important and

competitive research economy. Its research workforce capacity and R & D
investment are expanding rapidly, offering many new possibilities in a rapidly
diversifying research portfolio. Brazils profile, improving excellence, size and
interface with the rest of the international research base make it an essential
partner in any future international research portfolio.