What are Latin America's top universities?
The University of Buenos Aires ranks 84th worldwide in the QS World University Rankings 2027, the region's best for a third straight year.
Argentina's soccer team may not have gotten to lift the World Cup trophy again, but the country is home to the best university in Latin America for a third consecutive year.
The newest figures are not a bad showing for the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), which ranked just ninth in the region a few years ago.
Argentina's UBA, founded in 1821 and located in the national capital, is a public university that offers tuition-free higher education to over 300K students across more than 110 undergraduate programs and 550 graduate programs.
With an alumni pool that includes four Nobel Prize laureates and 17 former Argentine presidents, UBA was ranked the world's 84th best university in the QS World University Rankings 2027.
UBA On the World Stage
In the last two years, UBA has indeed been the only Latin American university to make it into the world's top-100 ranking.
This reflects the school's growing competitive advantage against its main regional competitors: the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (UC Chile), University of São Paulo (USP), and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
It also signals an increased level of competition in higher education on the world stage, especially from Asian universities.
Just two years ago UBA was joined by its chief Brazilian and Mexican counterparts in the world's 100 best universities.
At the time, USP and UNAM were respectively ranked the best and second-best universities in all of Latin America, in line with the Brazilian and Mexican traditions of academic excellence.
The Best Universities of Latin America
Today USP still has the region's highest number of citations per faculty and UNAM leads in academic reputation, while UC Chile has the highest scores in employability measures.
For its part, Argentina's UBA remains remarkably ahead when taking all elements into account, with an all-around score that far outclasses its peers.
Brazilians may well mourn USP's relative decline, just as they mourned their proud country failing to reach the World Cup quarterfinals. However, they may find some solace in the fact that Argentina still has a long way to go before it catches up to Brazil's 130 world-class universities and five World Cup titles.
Source: QS World University Rankings 2027
