U-Multirank and Latin American Universities

Abstract

The first U-Multirank survey was launched in 2014. It is a multi-dimensional and user-driven approach to international ranking in higher education, and includes more than 850 higher education institutions worldwide, some located in Latin America. This initiative has support and funding from the European Union. Unlike other international rankings, such as the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) or the Times Higher Education ranking (THE), that focus mainly on research activity, U-Multirank addresses also a multiplicity of higher education dimensions such as teaching and learning; knowledge transfer; internationalization; and regional engagement. Additionally, and most importantly, users can select which areas of performance to include when comparing a choice of universities. In addition to data usually employed by other international rankings, such as bibliometric and patent data bases, U-Multirank collects information provided by institutions (via an institutional questionnaire) and students (through a survey of students at participating universities). Unfortunately, information about non-research indicators is available only for a few Latin American (LA) universities. This article discusses whether more LA universities will be able to participate in this interesting and essential initiative in the near future. Similar projects in Latin America are discussed, followed by an analysis on whether some of the data requested by U-Multirank in the institutional questionnaires, can at all be collected by LA universities.