QS Quacquarelli Symonds is the world’s leading provider of services, analytics and knowledge to the global higher education sector; Its mission is to enable motivated people in the world to reach their potential through educational achievement, international mobility and professional development.
In addition to publishing the leading university rankings in the market, QS also gathers the International Student Survey, thus being the largest in the world about feelings, motivations, preferences, and events of potential international students.
The Intelligence Unit of QS and the division of professional and research services QS, provide universities around the world with a personalized comparative performance analysis according to central metrics for the objectives of each institution such as: teaching, research impact , reputation, employability of students and internationalization
Although higher education has faced new challenges as a result of the economic and health crisis in this global uncertainty, the results of the “2021 QS World University Rankings: LATAM report” have been released, offering information with original data and specific knowledge about the performance of each institution, in order to contribute to the empowerment of students and strengthening decision-making in their training (https://info.qs.com/rs/335-VIN-535/images/LATAM-Region-Rankings-2021-Report .pdf)
During the COVID-19 pandemic, QS has made the transition to offer its events online, to ensure that institutions around the world continue connecting with each other, in this sense our Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila has implemented important changes to stay ahead of the higher education in Mexico.
In this strict evaluation, 410 institutions from Latin America participated, the three countries with more institutions in the QS 2020 LATAM ranking are Brazil with 94, Mexico with 66 and Colombia with 60; The best 3 institutions, for the third consecutive year were, the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, the Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil) and the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey de México
These results, also reveal the efforts made by the current UAdeC administration to improve its educational quality, ranking 215 in Latin America and 26 nationally, after having ranked 44 in 2018.
This represents an important ascent that provides certainty and confidence in the programs to strengthen educational quality and scientific research implemented in our university, among them, we currently have academic staff with doctoral degrees, this aims to evaluate the quality of the training of teaching staff, detecting the percentage of those who have reached the highest level of preparation in their area of expertise.
Another indicator is citations per article, which measures the average number of citations obtained per publication, which is an approximate index of the impact and quality of the scientific work carried out in universities, the underlying data of articles and citations are indexed by Scopus , article and citation counts are standardized in an attempt to equalize the influence of citation, and the data used for the 2021 assessment is for a full five years (2014 to 2018).
Likewise, QS evaluates the strengthening and expansion of international research networks using data provided by Scopus, which evaluates the degree of international openness in terms of research collaboration for each evaluated institution; The Margalef index, used in science and the environment, has been adapted to estimate the wealth of selected international research partners for certain institutions.
Some of the indicators that the UAdeC have to improve for future evaluations are the relationship between the number of academic staff and the number of students, since a greater number of teachers per student can be an indicator of the institutions commitment to offering high-quality education.
On the other hand, the web impact indicator evaluates how effective the is use of new technologies in the universities, the information is provided by the Ranking Web of Universities, although the results are refactored to exclude the excellence indicator, because it is considered in metrics related to scientific research.
In addition, the academic reputation indicator, is based on the annual survey conducted by QS, evaluate the perception of academics around the world as the best institutions in the field of research. Finally, the reputation of the employer, in the annual survey QS aims to collect the opinions of employers about Institutions that train the best professionals.
