Introduction

Over the last two decades, global university rankings (GUR) have become broadly accepted as a legitimate means of benchmarking quality across higher education systems and between institutions (Altbach, 2016; Tight, 2019). Although the three primary GUR (Academic Ranking of World Universities, Times Higher Education, Quacquarelli Symonds) do not share a common design, they do collectively remain contentious, with all being subject to persistent critical scrutiny related to the potential fragility of indicators used to generate their powerful ordinal metrics (Altbach & Hazelkorn, 2018). This anxiety primary centres on three dimensions: the dominating function of research-centred and reputation-related criteria, the inherent privilege accorded to English-speaking systems, and more broadly the conflating of academic excellence with that characteristic of elite institutions of the Global North (Stack, 2016, 2020). However, despite these methodological concerns, key ranking outcomes are increasingly anticipated internationally as a credible barometer of the comparative success (or failure) of higher education institutions and, more frequently, national systems (Hazelkorn, 2015; Stack, 2016). It has been proposed that the escalating hegemony of GUR responds to a complex range of imperatives driving the development of global higher education, including elevating social demands for greater accountability and transparency with the massification of systems, accelerating globalising forces and the increasing commodification of learning (Altbach, 2016; Hazelkorn, 2019).

As the stakes involved in higher education choices have escalated—both in terms of private cost and graduate outcomes—GUR have offered an increasingly powerful and commercially attractive proxy of quality to simplify and rank the performance and prospective value of higher education institutions (Hazelkorn, 2016). This in turn is generating greater demand—in increasingly marketised environments of global higher education—for data that can afford benchmarking of comparative performance in research, teaching, and student support (Guaglianone, 2018; Yudkevich et al., 2015). Moreover, the affordances of technology have in recent years encouraged the publishers of rankings—which are primarily commercial, for-profit operations—to further expand the specificity, searchability, and levels of discrimination of GUR. As a result, over the last decade, major global rankers have significantly expanded the production of discipline-specific, regional, and national rankings. A key imperative for this devolution has been that in the primary global ranking scales, two out of every three of the 100 top-ranked universities come from North America or Europe (with the remainder from Australia and South-East Asia), and 95% were from only in 22 countries—with 75% confined to a dozen countries (Luque-Martínez & Faraoni, 2020).

The development of regionalised GUR has meant their reach has expanded, becoming increasingly pervasive in both shaping perceptions of systems, institutions, and programs, as well as more directly influencing student choice (Lee et al., 2019; Matzdorf & Greenwood, 2015). This more localised targeting of GUR has been identified as having the potential to increasingly shape social perceptions of higher education, generating more competition for more discriminating, debt-conscious prospective students (Marginson, 2017; Yudkevich et al., 2015). In addition, such rankings are increasingly in contest with local systems of accreditation and quality assessment by relocating institutions (and their associated educational missions) from the local to the global stage (Brankovic et al., 2018). Given this impact, the hierarchical metrics of GUR have the potential to progressively transform institutional governance and academic work to enhance competitive positioning framed by global expectations of quality, as well as further concentrate the economic and social capital of highly ranked ‘elite’ institutions (Hazelkorn, 2016).

The emergence of regionalised global university rankings (GUR) in Latin America

To generate more visible local differentiation, the major GUR generators have moved over the last decade to produce regional rankings as a sub-dimension of international scales (Bernasconi & Véliz-Calderón, 2016; Hazelkorn, 2019). These regional applications of global scales were a largely business-driven response to the relative anonymity of universities of the Global South in international rankings and the growing potential for benchmarking the comparative quality of regional institutions (Maldonado-Malonando & Cortes, 2017). In 2011, Quacquarelli Symonds introduced the first major GUR for Latin American universities, and this was followed by a second developed by its former business partner, Times Higher Education in 2016, with these ordinal ‘league tables’ of university quality fuelling heightened levels of social and institutional anxiety across the region about the relative state of institutions (Guaglianone, 2018). Even universities in the region that are not highly ranked have been increasingly caught in the spotlight of rankings, meaning the effect of these global rankings is increasingly universal in impact (Hazelkorn, 2016).

It has been argued that this epistemology is embodied the logic of GUR metrics which privilege research and reputational capital, inevitably favouring the powerful cultural history of the Global North that acts as a source of authority and arbiter for those operating in the ‘periphery’ (Connell, 2017; Hazelkorn, 2011). The effect of this has been seen as engendering a form of neo-imperialism, further stratifying global higher education through unbalanced positional competition that entraps higher education systems, institutions, and individual actors outside the Anglosphere (Marginson, 2016). Conversely, it has been proposed that in a context of globalising higher education (and despite their inherent limitations), regionalised GUR are ‘here to stay’ and have become a social mediator of university quality at a national level across the Latin American region. Central to this contention is that universities need to recognise the value of both transparency and accountability, meaning that making more effective use of GUR as means of improving practices, advocating for greater resourcing, or simply benchmarking comparative performance as a university at an international level (Bernasconi & Véliz-Calderón, 2016; Bulege, 2017; Ganga-Contreras et al., 2020).

Therefore, given the increasingly contested notion of regionalised GUR in the Latin American context, it seemed useful to more systematically analyse how they are being understood and debated at the system and local levels of higher education, and how these rankings are interacting with other methods of evaluating university quality (such as university accreditation systems and local rankings across the region). In the following section, the conceptual framework for the study is introduced, followed by a discussion of the methodology adopted for the research. Following this, the findings of the study are detailed, and the implications of these outcomes are explored.

Conceptual framework

To effectively understand the complex impact of GUR on Latin American higher education systems, the glonacal agency heuristic proposed by Marginson and Rhoades (2002) was adopted as the conceptual framework to guide this research. This conceptual framework offers a useful means to understand the effect of globalising forces in higher education, encouraging a focus on the nature of the reciprocal actions of agencies and collective agency at global, national, and local levels that are fundamental to shaping practices. In formulating this framework, Marginson and Rhoades (2002) highlighted the need to generate new conceptual categories to move beyond simplistic global-national or market-state binaries, as well as to disrupt the traditional narrow focus of higher education research on national systems. This approach encourages a deliberate analytical focus on the differential effect of global actors and agency on regional, national, and local responses, as well as the effect these have on the nature of global drives. These inter-relationships are represented in Fig. 1, which specifies the analytical framework that is the core of the heuristic and foregrounds the reciprocity of global, national, and local agencies. As Marginson and Rhoades (2002) assert, this heuristic is designed to animate the contested ‘intersections, interactions and mutual determinations of these levels and domains (organisational agencies and the agency of collectivities)’ (p.289), as well as the different layers and conditions that contextualise such relations.

Fig. 1
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Glonacal agency heuristic (Marginson & Rhoades, 2002)

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Therefore, the glonacal agency heuristic offered a highly suitable means of exploring the historically formed social relations that framed the inter-relationships between the agency of GUR, Latin American higher education systems, and local higher education actors. It was this framework that shaped the methodology for the study (discussed in more detail below), providing the framework for the selection and analysis of data that could provide a legitimate insight into the influence of the pervasive force of GUR on localised perceptions of system-level and institutional quality. This form of analysis offers the ability to analyse the forces that are encouraging the adoption of globalised discourses at a localised level and how these interact with existing frameworks of historically negotiated meaning. As such, it provides a potent means of understanding the agency of GUR in Latin America as they intervene to disrupt existing conceptions of higher education quality and mission, as well as the analysis of key tensions that emerge as a result. Framed by this glonacal agency heuristic, the key question that guided this investigation was: What are the key tensions between the agency of GUR and agentic responses at a regional and local level related to the understanding of the quality of universities?

Methodology

The design of the study was centred on a systematic review of literature developed over the last decade in Latin America specifically related to the function of regionally applied GUR and how their interaction with higher education systems, policies, institutions, and academic work. This form of interpretivist qualitative inquiry has been more frequently used in recent decades to synthesise perspectives and develop a more complex insight into phenomena (Cohen et al., 2018). The review approach adopted for this research is characterised by Gough et al. (2017) as a form of configurative synthesis: where the method is based on the assumption that the data are inherently heterogeneous and vertical in form. The objective of this form of synthesis is the interpretive translation between studies to allow the data to iteratively ‘speak’ to each other, allowing the development of critical perspectives on the tensions and fissures between differing perspectives. Critical meta-syntheses are well established in qualitative research as a means of investigating the conceptual foundations of a phenomenon, particularly in their ability to provide a critical interpretation and systematic analysis toward new understandings of the focus of investigated practices (Suri, 2018).

To develop data for the research, searches were conducted independently by two researchers of three primary regional databases—SciELO, Latindex, and Redalyc—which formed the primary basis of the search, with secondary searches on two international databases (Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus). Although it was understood that this range of databases would not be necessarily exhaustive, it was seen as most likely to yield a credible range of sources relevant to the research question. Secondly, this stratified searching approach was adopted to ensure sources were emanating from legitimate Latin American sources (as opposed to abstractions about Latin American contexts). Consistent with the glonacal conceptual heuristic guiding the design of the study, the search strings were designed to locate potential data sources that provided insights into how the global phenomenon of rankings has been interpreted and assimilated at national and local levels in Latin America. Therefore, the search terms included GUR and Latin America, GUR and individual national systems (e.g. Brazil, Chile, and Argentina), GUR and local Latin American institutions (selected based on prominence in regional versions of GUR), and university rankings and national systems or local institutions (to identify localised rankings).Footnote 1 This approach ensured that the data generated for the research centred on the effect of the interaction between GUR and regional and more localised conceptions of system and institutional quality, including those formed through accreditation regimes and existing localised rankings.

To ensure the validity and trustworthiness of the sample, sources in Spanish, Portuguese, or English languages were considered. As Suri (2018) identifies, searches conducted through common search channels do necessarily narrow the scope of analysis, meaning the exclusion of non-academic sources of social commentary (i.e. media and opinion pieces) and that is recognised as a limitation of this approach. For this reason, a search was also made using standard search engines for commentary on global or local rankings to supplement the academic sources identified. Using selection criteria developed around the research question, from this combined search, a total of 57 items were included in the analysis, with an additional 34 items excluded due to limited local relevance or indirect reference to rankings or non-geographically specific frames of reference. The items included in the meta-synthesis are outlined in detail in Table 1 and included papers that were classed primarily as either research analyses of rankings (n = 26), critical evaluations of rankings (n = 16), or specific institutional responses to rankings outcomes (n = 15). The articles selected for inclusion in the study are further summarised in the table, based on the analytical codes conceptually drawn from the glonacal framework (i.e. coded on the relationship between the global, regional-national and local), the primary analytical focus of the selected articles, their spatial distribution, and selected exemplars from the data set.

Table 1 Nature of articles considered in the meta-analysis (n = 57)
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A concept-driven coding approach was used as the framework for the thematic analysis of the data. This approach involves establishing a series of key thematic ideas around the conceptual framing and literature included in the study as a means of building forms of preliminary codes to be iteratively developed through the data analysis process (Gibbs, 2018). Adopting this approach, the items selected for inclusion were then systematically analysed using the affordances of the glonacal agency heuristic to identify key themes and core tensions around the interaction of local and global rankings with regional and national higher education systems. The researchers independently analysed the data using a series of codes drawn from the heuristic that embodied multi-levelled dimensions, including the relationship between global and local rankings systems, GUR and national accreditation systems, and conceptions of GUR by local agents (including institutions and individuals). This generated a series of primary tensions where the conflict between global and local imperatives generated by rankings were most acute, facilitating the development of a series of conceptual codes classifying the critical interrelationships and core tensions emerging between GUR and national-local conceptions of quality as a means of making sense of the levels of reciprocity, reflexivity, and antagonisms between these different levels. These were collectively reviewed and further refined until a consensus could be reached. This resulted in the identification of a series of coincidences and core tensions that are identified in the findings reported in the next section.

Findings

Based on analysis of the selected articles included in the study framed by the glonacal heuristic, a series of core tensions were identified across the data. In this section, these tensions are explored through the identified literature and are considered around the three primary tensions identified across the literature regarding the negotiation of global and local agency around GUR: quality assessment, university imaginary, and localised assessments of higher education.

Tensions around quality assessment

One of the primary tensions identified around the growing dissemination and embrace of GUR in Latin America was the potentially conflicting conceptions of university quality that these incited, both at the social and the institutional level. From the earliest discussion of global rankings, significant conflict has emerged about what are legitimate criteria with which to assess the quality of Latin American higher education. One of the seminal assertions of opposition to the imposition of globalised assumptions of quality emerged from a summit of regional university leaders convened by the UNESCO (Final Declaration, 2012). These leaders foregrounded the danger to local higher education systems of ordinal rankings undermining national systems of accreditation and quality assurance, primarily through the imposition of standards framed by systems of the Anglosphere with historically different social missions, significantly higher levels of investment and research trajectories. The application of homogenous forms of GUR was identified as possessing the potential to weaken public confidence in Latin American higher education systems and delegitimise local accreditation practices, which were designed to reflect the different evolutions and capabilities of national systems. Significantly, these leaders insist that global ranking agencies adhere to the so-called Berlin Principles (IREG, 2006), one of which insisted that outcomes ‘recognise the diversity of institutions and take the different missions and goals of institutions into account’. This was understood as meaning that assessments of performance needed to assail the unique social and institutional ambitions of Latin American systems, and this needed to be led by national accreditation agencies that understood the challenges of provision of higher education in lower-resourced and higher-demand learning environments (Final Declaration, 2012).

Developing this polemic, Ordorika and Lloyd (2015) suggest that the distinct sociocultural evolution of higher education across the region has meant that the hegemonic and homogenising potential of university rankings carried the potential to undermine the distinctive social purpose of universities. Furthermore, Appe et al. (2017) counterpose the conventional market-orientated model of universities of the Global North with the dominant Latin American model orientated toward heightened social and student engagement that reflects the heightened need for social solidarity and development. In doing so, they disrupt the traditional assumption of GUR, suggesting that enhanced social engagement and contribution may offer more substantial grounds for assessing higher education quality. Similarly, Guaglianone (2018) proposes that global rankings have established a hegemonic notion of quality, where aspiring to being ‘world-class’ is essentially centred on an aspirational drive to become an elite, research-focussed institution. However, given such conceptions essentially marginalise Latin American higher education and generate a largely futile debate around regional university quality, Guaglianone advocates the design of new rankings models (such as the European U-Multirank model) which encourage a more complex understanding of different elements of university quality and that discourages the simplistic generation of ordinal league tables. This perspective recognises the inherent attraction of rankings as a benchmarking or selection tool but instead stresses the need for greater local agency in the design of those factors determined as significant for comparative analysis of quality.

Conversely, it has been suggested that the application of GUR to assess the quality of Latin American higher education is legitimate and even desirable in an increasingly internationalised model of knowledge generation and exchange. For instance, while acknowledging some of the inherent limitations of rankings, it has been suggested that some of the objections to them are more ‘an elaborate excuse for failure’ (Bernasconi & Véliz-Calderón, 2016, p.39). Indeed, Bernasconi (2013) argues that GUR exposes the comparatively poor research performance and reputational capital of Latin American institutions, which tend to overly rely on the ‘elusive concept’ of divergent social mission as a means of avoiding the uncomfortable reality of being a teaching and research institution in a global environment. This suggests that Latin American universities—like those in Asia and elsewhere where rankings are low—should be seeking to improve their performance and adopt the internationalist notion of a university as a centre of knowledge (Bernasconi, 2013).

To this end, others have proposed exercising more local forms of agency in terms of understanding the implications of GUR outcomes. Such perspectives urge the recognition of the reality that escalating demands for transparency and accountability across the region mean regionalised GUR are likely to become a permanent fixture in discourses of higher education quality. Such voices advocate finding a form of détente: while recognising the limitations of various rankings, using them as a point of global benchmarking of university quality and a means of advocacy for expanded national investment in higher education. For instance, Ganga-Contreras et al. (2020), Torres-Samuel et al. (2019), Bulege (2017), and Villaseñor et al. (2015) propose various means by which to expand local agency in the absorption of GUR, highlighting the need to adopt more pragmatic orientations toward the use of global rankings to understand the quality of Latin American institutions. These perspectives propose various mechanisms to more effectively interpret ranking data offered by different rankings at a local level to improve the potential relevance of outcomes to develop the quality of regional higher education. A common feature of these analyses is the need to develop interpretive tools to allow governments and institutions to develop greater agency in understanding and locally responding to the challenges ranking outcomes identify, most notably related to research production and internationalisation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, such perspectives tend to be shared by the limited numbers of Latin American institutions ranked in the top tier by GUR, with these universities generally welcoming the results as a sign of their alignment with global demands on higher education (Torres-Samuel et al., 2019). However, equally in these responses, some universities remain conscious of both the limitations of GUR at a regional level and prevailing local imperatives for higher education to contribute to national development (and not merely compete internationally).

Tensions around the university imaginary

Arguably underpinning the debate as to how rankings relate to understandings of university quality is a more fundamental question: What should be the nature and ambition of a Latin American university in the first decades of the twenty-first century? Bernasconi (2013) suggests that the socio-developmental mission of the Latin American university—an imaginary that is rooted in the struggles for social progress and at other times, democracy—is a primary source of contemporary hostility toward GUR. In reflecting on the UNESCO-sponsored meeting of university leaders mentioned earlier, Ambrus (2012) observed that the core issues identified revolved around the potential corruption of an authentic identity grounded in the histories of the Latin American universities. The imposition of parameters defined by the research, resource, and reputationally-rich systems of the Global North had the distinct danger of redefining policy understandings and institutional responses in the Global South: reinforcing stratification, internalising dominant epistemologies, and imposing linguistic demands in research production (García de Fanelli & Pita Carranza, 2018; Guzmán-Valenzuela, 2017).

Moreover, several authors have foregrounded the increasingly powerful function that scientific and citation indexes perform in shaping the core research and reputational dimensions of rankings data (e.g. Barsky, 2018; Beigel, 2018; Vélez-Cuartas et al., 2014). This is seen as having the effect of encouraging Latin American researchers to publish in dominant international journals which are overwhelmingly published in English. Given that the traditional form of dissemination in Latin American contexts is via book-based publishing or national Spanish or Portuguese-language journals, the imposition of publication indices of GUR is seen as potentially corrupting national university missions and forcing authors to adhere to differing cultural and knowledge paradigms to be adjudged as successful. The nature of this effect has been illuminated by Guzmán-Valenzuela (2017), who, using the case study of research on higher education, identified a significant growth in Latin American academics publishing in the journals based in the Global North. Moreover, this research also found that these academics tended to give ‘value to knowledge on teaching and learning produced in the North, while rendering invisible both knowledge of the South and its contexts’ (p.14). This foregrounds the dilemma of seeking publication in globally recognised journals that fuel a critical element of global rankings: the need to adopt the accepted epistemologies of the Global North to render knowledge ‘global’. This narrowing has been characterised by Vessuri et al. (2013) as enforcing a globalised competitive marketplace around publications, built around ‘core’ journals in disciplines and international journal and citation rankings (and therefore devaluing production developed outside this market). Somewhat paradoxically, Vélez-Cuartas et al. (2014) establish that the levels of published research in Latin America have also been growing and diversifying, yet the monopolising of the value of these global scientific journals and databases means that much of this work is rendered invisible as it is developed outside the epistemologies privileged by the Global North. Although it is more difficult to confirm, it has also been suggested that the application of GUR has encouraged national governments to further direct research resources to the highest-ranked institutions (who advocate for this support based on their ranked status), adding to the stratification (and thereby, competition) between elite and residual institutions (García de Fanelli & Pita Carranza, 2018; Perez Mejias et al., 2018).

Tensions around localised assessments of higher education

Over recent decades, a series of locally-based university rankings have emerged in several Latin American countries, most notably in Brazil, Mexico, and Chile (Ganga-Contreras et al., 2018). These rankings, which have been primarily disseminated by commercial publishers using divergent methodologies—ranging from pseudo-scientific to highly subjective—have largely been orientated toward students and parents to guide prospective study choices (Calderón et al., 2017). Reflecting this motive, these localised rankings have tended to foreground factors such as prospective labour market outcomes from institutions and programs, the levels of staff academic qualifications, and some limited attempts to assess teaching quality. Conversely, lesser emphasis is generally given to issues of institutional reputation, research performance, and internationalisation that are afforded more prominence in global metrics. Although it has been argued that these local rankings are of highly variable quality and value, they have been regarded as embodying at least some unique aspects of the evolution and diversity of local higher education systems (Calderón et al., 2017, Ganga-Contreras et al., 2018) and potentially offering more grounded assessments of prospects in the improvement of local higher education quality (Estevez Nenninger et al., 2018; Teodoro et al., 2018).

For instance, using the case of Chile, Ganga-Contreras et al. (2020) highlight the paradox of local rankings: they embody both fragilities of ranking methodologies and the powerful attractiveness of local relevance (particularly for prospective institutional and program selection). Although such localised rankings have tended to adopt some of the broad measures used internationally, they have opted to rely less on reputational data and more on ostensibly more objectified forms of institutionally supplied data, or on so-called output measures (such as graduate employment or graduate opinion). However, the significance of local rankings is subject to sharply divergent perspectives. For example, from an Argentinean perspective, Andres (2017) contends that global rankings are largely irrelevant in the Latin American context and are essentially an oppressive force of globalisation and that more localised and collaborative forms of institutional assessment offer a more valid alternative. Others have warned of the increasingly social and institutional attention given to GUR risks distorting the potential gains of the reorientation of regional universities toward a post-colonial future (Feyen, 2021) and that reputationally-driven scales tend to reinforce stereotypical perceptions—often borne of persistent marking efforts—rather than understand the quality of institutional practices (Montufar Salcedo, 2015). Similarly, it has also been argued (e.g. Guaglianone, 2018; Maldonado-Malonando & Cortes, 2017) that the comparative anonymity of Latin American higher education in GUR means that alternative approaches centred on more localised forms of comparison are needed. Making this case, Maldonado-Malonando & Cortes (2017) suggest that there is little evidence that GUR are influential in local policy formation, meaning new models of broad comparative assessment based on the unique contextual realities of Latin American higher education systems are essential. This call for more attuned ranking models has also been advocated as a means of addressing persistent social demands in the region for a legitimate comparison of university quality (Final Declaration, 2012; Guaglianone, 2018; Reyes, 2016).

Conversely, others have suggested that, as GUR are ‘here to stay’, they need to be and need to be understood in more local terms to allow them to be of greater utility. For example, several different methods have been proposed as a means of making greater sense and relevance of differing global rankings. Such methods involve either critical comparative analyses of the outcomes of different models (e.g. Ganga-Contreras et al., 2020; Torres-Samuel et al., 2019), to strategies to specifically improve potential outcomes over time (Rubén et al., 2019; Zayas Márquez et al., 2016), or as a potential tool to drive the internationalisation of Latin American higher education (Leal et al., 2017; Villaseñor Becerra et al., 2015). The common thread in these forms of analyses is a begrudging acceptance of the ubiquity of GUR and attempts to offer an enhanced means of building on the potential benefits of international comparisons. An underpinning contention is that the reality of GUR outcomes is to demonstrate the limited research capabilities of Latin American universities, which hinder their ability to exercise as institutional centres of knowledge (Bernasconi, 2013). It is argued that this is further problematic given the history and scale of regional universities, and the reality that smaller systems (often also replete with social missions) have comparatively succeeded or, most notably in the case of Asian universities, generally improved their ranking levels over time (Bernasconi & Véliz, 2016). Supportive perspectives are also strongly evidenced in the range of institutional responses to the releases of GUR outcomes. Unsurprisingly, such endorsements are largely (though not exclusively) confined to those institutions most highly ranked in the region and nation-states. For instance, where rankings offered comparatively favourable outcomes, institutions lauded the recognition at the highest levels of excellence and inherent value of international recognition, and found encouragement to keep improving to enhance prospective rankings or more simply as a confirmation of academic excellence and level of international impact. However, despite the generally effusive tone of much of these responses, some caution is also evident, with most calling either for more suitable measures suited to local educational circumstances or the need for adequate funding to ensure both the local-social and international expectations of higher education can be effectively addressed.

Discussion

In advocating for their glonacal heuristic, Marginson and Rhoades (2002) foreground the limitations in the analysis of how global higher education orthodoxies interact with regional and local agency, and how such negotiations shape regional and national policies. Moreover, they urge greater attention to be given to how regional and national actors reflexively engage with international forces, and how they develop levels of influence through coalescing these oft-disparate forces. In this analysis, several critical tensions have been identified that reflect this negotiation of the increasingly hegemonic forces of GUR in the Latin American context.

Firstly, it is apparent that the diverse agency is exercised across the region in orientating to the social and political demands for metrics on comparative institutional and system-wide quality. What however is conspicuous in the region and across nation-states is the sharp tension between the emerging conception of university quality being needed to be understood in a globalising environment of higher education, clashing with the prevailing socio-historical notion of regional universities being responsive to—and evaluated against—the developmental demands of nation-states. The foundations of this core tension can be understood through the evolution of higher education in Latin America, which broadly developed around an anti-colonialist sentiment, and was shaped by contested attempts to influence national development in the face of local oligarchies and often tight (and even repressive) state controls (Bernasconi, 2008; Guzmán-Valenzuela & Bernasconi, 2018).

This history is fundamentally different to that of the evolution of the North American or European systems, meaning that contemporary conceptions of the mission and performance of universities are sharply contested. For this reason, those advocating a stronger embrace of GUR tend to also recognise the need for this genealogy to be understood, and for a cautious assessment of outcomes. This agency has to some extent had an effect, with for instance the Times Higher Education World University Rankings modifying its global criteria when applied to Latin America. In their explanation, this has meant the assessment criteria have been ‘specially recalibrated to reflect the characteristics of emerging economy universities’ (Times Higher Education, 2021, p.24), most notably meaning a slightly higher weighting on teaching and lesser on research performance but still managing to paint ‘a somewhat bleak picture of the potential future-facing Latin American universities’ (Bothwell, 2020, p.5). Here the essence of this tension is laid bare: GUR proposes a teleology where being lower ranked represents inadequacy, and even crisis. The notion of a global form of university mission is therefore increasingly agentic given the growing hegemony of GUR regionally, further driven by their conspicuous embrace by nominally ‘successful’ regional institutions and localised ranking lists. This has developed in tandem with the gradual decline of those national ranking models with more localised criteria, as well as with increasing social unease around the robustness of university quality (often related to limitations in local accreditation schema).

Secondly, there is growing evidence of the potentially distorting impact that GUR may have on the nature of local university practices. As was highlighted in the analysis, considerable research interest is being demonstrated in multi-levelled strategies to potentially improve ranking levels of university systems and local institutions. A significant number of papers in the sample illuminated methods by which national systems, institutions, or programs could use their agency to improve prospective rankings through reframing activities, research focus, or reputational marketing. Others sought to highlight which of the rankings may be most suitable to understand regional or national contexts, or proposed instruments to better interrogate the global data to make it more relevant as a form of critical assessment. The effect of this strategic reorientation toward global rankings’ criteria was also made visible in several tangible ways. Several researchers (i.e. Guzmán-Valenzuela & Bernasconi, 2018; Guzmán-Valenzuela & Gómez, 2019) have been able to establish the changing patterns of Latin American research publication toward more highly ranked English-language academic journals, and the concurrent embrace of the epistemologies of the Global North (and even the local integration of international researchers). This outcome suggests that the nature of rankings is having a shaping impact at a quite practical level, potentially hastening the reformation of Latin American universities and their foci. Such actions are also animated by institutional management and higher education policymakers in the region, who increasingly appear conscious to varying degrees about the need to support activities that are likely to be made globally—or at least regionally—visible. Instances of this effect identified in the analysis included expanded reputational marketing, incentives for research publication in leading indexed journals and using performance management to increase measurable outcomes. However, although such gestures may potentially generate an improved ranking outcome, is it improving the quality of the Latin American university, or just its metrics?

Similarly, the commercial motive that underpins most localised rankings—which primarily centre on metrics designed to guide student (and parent) choices of institutions and programs—tends to add a further complication to the impact of global rankings. Given many national-level rankings are produced for newspapers or periodicals, the chosen indicators tend to foreground the most accessible forms of data that largely illuminates the existing hierarchies of university socioeconomic positioning and levels of social reputation. With such localised rankings most often fuelled through such indicators as entrance scores, staff-to-student ratios, retention rates and labour market outcomes, the question again arises whether such rankings are measuring institutional and program quality or are instead reflecting entrenched perceptions (and thereby feeding further stratification). In both the case of these more established local rankings and more recently emerging localised global rankings, university leaders appear divided on the issue of rankings as a proxy of institutional quality. At a collective level, clear attempts have been made to chart a more autonomous path for understanding the quality of regional higher education. Nevertheless—at the level of local agency—in the case of the limited number of highest-ranked institutions, the global acclaim is highly regarded and persistently marketed, while outcomes are largely disregarded by most institutions. However, the social power of regional forms of GUR has meant that increasingly institutions with comparatively low overall rankings are seeking to identify a favourable element in one of the rankings to highlight in institutional marketing efforts (thereby further reinforcing the validity of global forms of assessment).

Given national governments are now regularly asked by local media to provide analysis on the relative ‘successes’ or ‘failure’ of their universities in GUR, there is an escalating social legitimacy and therefore increasing the pressure on ‘failing’ institutions to develop remedial strategies with which to improve their rankings outcomes (and thereby national higher education status). The effect of this global agency on the local is to then reinforce an ordinal sense of university stratification and impose a potentially homogenising effect on the eclectic sociocultural histories of systems and individual institutions. At the same time, as Amsler (2014) contends, there is no substantive evidence that GUR are narrowing educational inequalities or leading to a strengthening of the relationship between expanding research and higher quality teaching. Instead, the evidence presented here from across Latin America suggests the narrowing that is occurring is in such things as the value accorded to local epistemologies, diversity in approaches to teaching and research, and the imperatives of the region. The seduction of GUR is encouraging greater efforts to build a global reputation, to publish within the dominant epistemologies of the Global North and ultimately to understand quality through a proxy of highly contestable global metrics.

However, equally there continue to be efforts to counter the hegemony of GUR that find their origin in the broader drives to limit the corporatisation and stratification of academic work, to recognise inherent inequalities within and between global higher education systems and to decolonise conceptions of the contemporary university derived from the Global North. At a broad level, several attempts have been made to diversify the frameworks of rankings to reflect the different educational objectives of systems, institutions, and programs more effectively (the most notable example being the European U-Multirank model). Others have advocated diverse responses from more localised and cooperative models of quality assessment (Brankovic et al., 2018; Stack, 2021); recognition of epistemic diversity and plurality (Connell et al., 2017; Marginson, 2016); and heightened regulation of GUR providers (Gadd, 2021; Hazelkorn, 2019). However, the metamorphosing and increasing pervasiveness of global rankings—in tandem with heightening social demand for more shared metrics for the national and international benchmarking of system quality—means that alternative formations will remain essentially peripheral in the short to medium term.

Conclusion

The rising hegemony of GUR has represented a profound challenge to the understanding of university quality across the different systems and higher education institutions of Latin America. At the most essential level, to varying degrees, GUR have begun to debase regional and local orthodoxies of quality assurance centred on accreditation and localised rankings, proposing a fundamentally different university imaginary firmly grounded in the epistemologies of the Global North. Conversely, the drive of globalisation is a seemingly irresistible force, meaning that it is most unlikely that GUR will disappear. Indeed, with the rich affordances of technology-driven metrics, they are only likely to become more expansive. Therefore, if it is realistic to assume that a globalised conception of university quality will eventually predominate, is it better for Latin American universities to orientate more toward the trajectory of these international norms? It has been suggested this may also provide greater leverage for systems and institutions to advocate for greater government support to improve university performance.

However, this epistemic clash does have the potential to generate increasing conflict between GUR, social expectations, and local accreditation systems. For instance, will the credibility of institutional quality be undermined by the introduction of a focus on reputational capital and research citations? Generally, accreditation systems across the region tend to focus on more practical matters related to teaching and graduate outcomes. What will be the consequences of contradictory outcomes of rankings and accreditation assessment, or will one simply reinforce the stratification created by the other? Furthermore, will the eclectic missions and orientation of institutions be diluted with the normalising of generic expectations of quality performance, and can GUR legitimately represent university quality when they necessarily can only provide a meaningful assessment of a relatively small number of universities across the region? These are important questions for policymakers and institutions to consider in advance of the socialisation of global norms, as the danger is that quality could become more about metrics and movement, rather than improved overall practices and social expectations. The outcomes of this paper suggest that this question is still contested, but certainly the pull of globalised rankings systems is already evident in the changing patterns of institutional representation and academic work. Thus, the time for deliberation over the prospective impact of GUR on Latin American higher education futures has arrived, and the need for further debate is evident.