Universidade de São Paulo is the world’s leading PhD-granting institution

Universidade de São Paulo (USP) is the university that grants the most PhDs worldwide. The finding is part of the Academic Ranking of World Universities, released by the Center for World Class Universities and Jiao Tong University’s Higher Education Institute in Shanghai, which named the São Paulo university first in the number of theses defended among 682 global institutions.

By Elton Alisson

Agência FAPESP – Universidade de São Paulo (USP) is the university that grants the most PhDs worldwide. The finding is part of the Academic Ranking of World Universities, released by the Center for World Class Universities (CWCU) and Jiao Tong University’s Higher Education Institute in Shanghai, China, which named the São Paulo university first in the number of theses defended among 682 global institutions.

The ranking also names USP as having the third highest annual research budget out of 637 universities, as well as being fifth in the number of scientific articles published of 1,181 institutions worldwide and 21st in the percentage of professors with doctorates out of 286 universities.

In the opinion of Vahan Agopyan, USP’s Dean of Graduate Studies and a member of FAPESP’s Board of Trustees, the university’s leadership in PhD graduates is due to USP’s graduate tradition in Brazil.

In 1965, when new guidelines were set for graduate studies in Brazil, based on the work of Newton Sucupira (1920-2007), USP already had a significant number of lecturers with doctoral degrees and stood out as a university that would meet the demand for master’s and doctoral degree holders. Sucupira was also responsible for creating the Federal Education Council, now known as the National Education Council.

“In the 1970s and 1980s, almost half of the doctoral degrees in Brazil were obtained at USP, and today more than 20% of graduate students also obtain doctoral degrees here. This has allowed the university to become a major global graduate center, which is now confirmed by this international ranking,” Agopyan commented in an interview with Agência FAPESP.

In 2011, for the first time, the number of doctoral students at the university, which celebrated having granted 100,000 graduate degrees, was higher than that of master’s students.

“This a reflection of the increase in the number of master’s programs offered throughout the country. As a result, graduates prefer to do a master’s in their own region and seek out USP to do their doctorate or another more specialized activity,” Agopyan said.

At the same time, the number of USP graduate students has remained steady over the past few years. Currently, the university has 23,000 graduate students and has granted degrees to 2,192 doctoral students and 3,376 master’s students – numbers that have changed very little over the past 15 years.

“We are already large, and we have been working at full capacity for several years. Each of our lecturers has, on average, more than five mentees, which is already a high number,” affirmed Agopyan.

According to the dean, this phenomenon is also common at the world’s main universities, including schools in the U.S., Europe and China that are listed in the ranking, where the number of graduate students is stable and the graduate programs operate at capacity.

One of the factors Agopyan believes has contributed to USP’s continued leadership in graduating PhDs is the university’s activity in all fields of knowledge. By contrast, universities abroad typically have areas of specialization. “We are a multidisciplinary institution,” he highlights.

In Agopyan’s assessment, the challenge now is not only more training but also better training for doctoral students worldwide. For this reason, USP has sought international quality standards through promoting the evaluation of, and support for, its post-graduate programs and the mobility of its faculty and students to other countries. “We don’t want just quantity but also quality,” he affirmed.

FAPESP spent R$ 277.3 million in 2010 on scholarships in Brazil under its scholarship program. Of this total, based on the principal investigator or student’s institutional ties, USP received R$ 132.7 million (or 47.87%). In 2010, FAPESP granted 1,362 doctoral scholarships.

Spotlight on SP universities

In addition to USP, the ranking prepared by the CWCU ranked Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) in 38th place in terms of doctoral theses defended, 138th in the number of articles published and 62nd in the percentage of professors with doctoral degrees.  

Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp) was ranked 55th in doctorates granted, 150th in the number of articles published and 31st in the percentage of professors holding doctoral degrees.

In another ranking released in January, the Web of the World Universities, known as Webometrics, which measures the visibility of universities in the main search engines on the Internet, highlighted USP as 20th worldwide and the first in Latin America, followed by Universidade Nacional Autônoma do México, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and Unesp. Unicamp took 9th place among Latin American universities.

Other Brazilian universities that figure in the top 10 ranking for Latin America are Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Universidade de Brasília and Universidade Federal do Paraná.