Semantic convergence and national differentiation in university mission and vision statements across Iberoamerican countries

Universities use mission and vision statements to communicate institutional identity while responding to legitimacy, accreditation, and accountability expectations. This study examines how convergence and differentiation coexist in the public identity discourse of higher education institutions across Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Spain, Mexico, and Peru. We screened a sampling frame of 1,145 institutions and analyzed the 901 mission statements and 798 vision statements publicly available on their official websites in 2021. Original Spanish-language texts were processed through tokenization, lemmatization, normalized term-frequency analysis, semantic co-occurrence networks, Bonacich centrality, hierarchical clustering, cross-country correlations, QAP comparisons, and robustness checks. The findings identify a shared legitimation lexicon centered on university, quality, knowledge, research, society, and development, consistent with isomorphic pressures in policy-dense higher education environments. Nevertheless, national systems reorganize this common vocabulary in distinctive configurations. Mexico presents the densest and most evenly connected semantic structures; Costa Rica displays lower cohesion and greater lexical dispersion; Spain emphasizes academic and international orientations; and Peru, Chile, and Colombia exhibit differentiated combinations of sustainability, innovation, professional formation, and social contribution. These patterns support the interpretation that institutional differentiation occurs primarily through the reweighting and recombination of legitimized terms rather than through wholly distinct vocabularies. The study contributes to institutional and higher education research by explaining how imitation and differentiation coexist at the discursive level. The comparative evidence is descriptive and does not establish causality. Semantic analysis can help policymakers, quality-assurance agencies, and university leaders identify excessive convergence while preserving credible institutional diversity and strategically meaningful identity statements.