Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

Photo by Caetano Machado/Agecom/UFSC.

The QS World University Rankings: Latin America & The Caribbean 2025, released on Thursday, 3 October, ranked the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC) as the 21st best universities in Latin America, and 18th best in South America. The institution was also ranked 8th among Brazilian universities (and 4th among the federal universities).

UFSC achieved a final score of 76.6 (on a scale from 1 to 100). This places it among the 5% of the best universities in Latin America and the Caribbean.  The 2025 score surpasses the 68.7 score it received last year, when it was ranked 23rd in Latin America. This marks a significant improvement in the university’s performance.

The ranking

The QS Rankings are produced annually by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), a British company specialized in education. The ranking evaluated 437 institutions across 24 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Leading the ranking this year is the Universidade de São Paulo (USP).

Universities are evaluated based on eight indicators, each with weighted differently: academic reputation (30%); employer reputation (20%); faculty student ratio (10%); staff with PhD (10%); international research network (10%); citations per paper (10%); papers per faculty (5%) and web impact (5%). In this edition, UFSC excelled particularly in web impact (99.4), staff with PhD (99.1 score), and paper per faculty (98.5 score).

According to UFSC’s Director of International Relations, Dr. Fernanda Leal, the results reflect the university’s strong reputation, a criterion that accounts for 50% of the overall score. She notes that UFSC’s position also highlights its role as one of the leading research universities in Latin America. However, Dr. Leal emphasizes the limitations of relying on rankings for decision-making and formulating institutional internationalization policies, particularly due to their competitive nature and the lack of consideration for key factors that shape Brazilian public universities, such as outreach and community engagement.

A fundamental aspect in evaluating universities’ performance, especially public ones, is their impact on society, says the Secretary for International Relations, Prof. Luiz Carlos Pinheiro Machado Filho. “This aspect has been addressed by university rankings, but still in an indirect way. The evaluations primarily reflect the academic work of universities, focusing on teaching, research and innovation. Faculty, staff and students engaged in academic work should therefore be congratulated, but those who work in the intermediary activities, which support these efforts, should also be recognized”, he states. The Secretary for International Relations aadded that the QS rakings assigned a 15% weight to the “global engagement” lens and that UFSC’s position in the ranking also reflects an internationalization effort by the entire academic community.

Regarding UFSC’s articles and external citations from 2018 and 2023, the primary focus was on research in the subjects of Life Sciences & Medicine.

Check out the complete ranking results on the QS website.

Translated by SINTER/UFSC.

Read the original article here.