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While China led the rankings in Asia in sheer quantity, Brazil came on the top of the QS Latin America rankings, both in the top 10 and the top 300. Brazil indeed boasted the region’s two highest-ranked institutions, Universidade de São Paulo in first place and and Unicamp (Universidade estadual de Campinas) in the second place. Overall, Latin America’s largest nation placed 79 institutions among the top 300. Chile, with its relatively sparse population of 17 million, took the third and fourth places, with Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Universidad de Chile respectively. Therefore, despite only having a total of 30 institutions in the overall rankings, Chile remains, together with Brazil, considered a regional higher education powerhouse.
Mexico and Colombia took the remaining three places in the top 10. In the overall rankings, the representation of countries was as follows: Brazil (79 institutions), Mexico (47), Colombia (41), Argentina (36), Chile (30) and Peru (16).
One of the biggest novelties from QS this year was the release of the first full Arab Region rankings, described as the “Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals took the first place in the region, with the American University of Beirut hot on its heels, in second place. Saudi Arabia had a total of three institutions among the top 10, while Egypt, the UAE, and Jordan had two each. These same countries were well ranked overall: Saudi Arabia had the strongest presence among the top 100, with 19 institutions, followed by Egypt with 15 and the UAE with 13. Notably, Jordan –with its population of merely 6 million, compared to Saudi Arabia’s 29 million or Egypt’s 82 million –managed to place 9 institutions in the larger list.
Other significant players in the region were Lebanon and Iraq, who did not make it into the exclusive top 10 club but nonetheless had 11 and 10 institutions among the top 100 respectively.