Mexican University Rankings
Dec 30th, 2008 by GCR Editor
Continuing our survey of university Google-rankings by country, what can we discover about the best universities in Mexico? Although English is widely spoken in academic circles, the language of instruction in Mexican universities is Spanish, so we will want to search google.com.mx for “universidad” rather than “university.” Here’s what we get:
- Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
- Universidad Veracruzana
- Universidad Virtual del Tecnológico de Monterrey
- Universidad Panamericana – Guadalajara
- Universidad de Guanajuato
- Universidad de Guadalajara
- Universidad Regiomontana, Monterrey
- Universidad Autónoma Chapingo
- Universidad Iberoamericana
- Universidad de Colima
Of particular interest in this list is the third-ranked Universidad Virtual del Tecnológico de Monterrey, a predominantly online (”Universidad Virtual”) institution. Google pays no attention to the existence or non-existence of a physical campus in assigning rank to university websites, so there is in principle no reason why an online institution can’t outrank any or all brick-and-mortar schools.
What Google “sees” as it evaluates a college or university is the extent of its website(s) and in particular, the number of times people off campus link to the institution’s pages—each link functions as a king of micro-recommendation that says “this place is important.” Any single link or micro-recommendation might not be worth much, but a pattern of such recommendations, coming from many different sources, and built up overtime, well, that’s exactly what reputation consists of everywhere, whether online or offline.