Calidad académica de las universidades: perspectiva desde un ranking mundial. Evidencia empírica para el año 2020

Abstract

In a global economy, the positioning of knowledge as the foundation of economic, social and political power has driven the control of academic’s quality by leading Higher Education (HE) institutions and policy makers around the world. In this context, the universities that lead the world university rankings are configured as references for quality HE, a context in which the debate on whether public or private education is the that prevails in the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) of worldwide excellence. To answer this question, this article analyzes the academic’s quality of the HEIs that leads the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) worldwide. For a proper analysis, it is necessary to distinguish between public, private for- profit and private non-profit universities, our hypothesis being that the latter are the ones that provide the highest academic’s quality. After using stratified sampling, 277 universities ranked in the 2020 ARWU were considered. Based on a cluster analysis and econometrics estimations using LASSO, quantile regression and ordered probit models, it was found that HEIs that are configured as non- governmental organizations (NGOs) provides higher quality, such a result can be interpreted that education of excellence comes from HEIs that are not linked to the state or the market.