Abstract
Of the roughly a dozen Latin American universities that figure in the international rankings, half are Brazilian, while just one is Mexican. This disparity is largely the result of the differences between the two countries’ economic development models. Since the 1960s or before, Brazilian higher education policy has focused on developing a competitive research sector as part of a broader strategy for economic development. In contrast, Mexican government policies have largely focused on increasing access to higher education, with limited investment in science and technology. Such differences appear to have an impact on the perceptions of academics in both countries toward their profession, as well as in their scientific production. In this paper we examine the differences and similarities between the academic professions in Latin America’s two largest nations, using the results from the CAP survey of academics in Brazil and Mexico. In particular, we examine data in the following areas: professional trajectories and profiles; education levels; workplace conditions; teaching and research activities; levels of scientific production; and opinions and attitudes toward academic activities.
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Notes
- 1.
In previous articles, we have argued that the rankings’ methodologies – which tend to give primary weight to measures of scientific production, such as articles published in English-language journals – are biased in favor of a sole model of higher education institution: the elite, U.S. research university. In essence, the rankings are “harvardometers”, measuring how much a university looks like Harvard. In that context, Latin American universities, which fulfill a much broader role in their country’s development as “state-building universities” (Ordorika and Pusser 2007) and are generally more focused on teaching than on research, tend to fare poorly in the international rankings.
- 2.
The Academic Ranking of World Universities was the first classification of universities at an international level. It has been produced by the Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, China, since 2003. It currently ranks 500 universities primarily on the basis of their scientific production, measured on the basis of the number of articles they publish in international peer-reviewed journals (as measured by the Reuters Science Citation Index), the number of Nobel Prize laureates among their staff or graduates, among other indicators. In most of the international rankings, the USP and the UNAM tend to lead the region, although in recent years the Brazilian university has consistently come out on top.
- 3.
While most private institutions are money-making ventures, the form in which they utilize their profits determines their legal and fiscal status in most countries. In general, not for profit institutions are legally required to reinvest their profits in the institution in exchange for receiving tax exempt status, while for-profit institutions distribute profits among shareholders or their owners, and are required to pay taxes on a share of their earnings. The enormous growth in the for-profit model of education providers in recent years has sparked controversy in many countries, with critics arguing that the market logic should not apply to education, while proponents argue that the institutions offer a low-cost and flexible alternative for students who are not accepted into the public universities (Bok 2003).
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Martínez Stack, J., Lloyd, M., Ordorika, I. (2015). The Impact of Government Policies on the Profiles and Attitudes of Academics in Two Emerging Economies: Brazil and Mexico. In: Cummings, W., Teichler, U. (eds) The Relevance of Academic Work in Comparative Perspective. The Changing Academy – The Changing Academic Profession in International Comparative Perspective, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11767-6_12
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