The Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata was relatively less important compared to other regions in Spanish South America, as most economic activity was based around the Andes range.

Cultural and educational work in Buenos Aires was carried out by members of the Company of Jesus, and within the viceroyalty, Córdoba, Chuquisaca, and Santiago de Chile already counted with universities.

[26] Free access to the university was suspended during the rule of caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas, and the number of students decreased considerably.

Budget cuts imposed by Rosas's government meant professors were no longer being paid, and the Department of Exact Sciences was nearly forced to close down.

The new government of the State of Buenos Aires made bettering the university's conditions a priority; the political elites began seeing higher education as a necessary part of the country's upcoming consolidation and stabilization stages.

[31] The newfound prosperity experienced by Argentina at the turn of the 20th century allowed the children of (primarily European) immigrants, the new Argentine middle class, to attend university for the first time.

[36] The return of Juan Domingo Perón to power through democratic elections in 1973 marked the beginning of a new age for the University of Buenos Aires.

Ottalagano launched a fierce campaign of persecution within the university, targeting students and professors suspected of being sympathizers of the Peronist Left.

During Ottalagano's administration, up to 4000 professors were fired (including Nobel in Chemistry laureate Luis Federico Leloir), and four students were disappeared by the State.

Professors and students were disappeared regardless of their political affiliations, as public universities were suspected of being "breeding grounds" for leftist sympathizers and subversives.

The Consejo Superior is made up of the rector, the deans of the thirteen faculties, and five representatives for each of the three constituent bodies in the university: professors, students and graduates, rounding up to 29 members.

Historically, rectors have belonged to the "reformist" camp, closely related to the Radical Civic Union and its student wing, Franja Morada.

Seventeen Argentine presidents have attended the University of Buenos Aires: Carlos Pellegrini, Luis Sáenz Peña, José Evaristo Uriburu, Manuel Quintana, Roque Sáenz Peña, Victorino de la Plaza, Hipólito Yrigoyen, Marcelo T. de Alvear, Agustín P. Justo, Roberto Ortiz, Ramón Castillo, Arturo Frondizi, Arturo Illia, Raúl Alfonsín, Adolfo Rodríguez Saá, Eduardo Duhalde, and Alberto Fernández.

Manuel Quintana also served as rector of the university,[65] while Alberto Fernández taught courses on criminal law at the graduate level for many years before being elected to the presidency.

[66] Many political leaders and relevant figures have also been educated at UBA, such as the Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine in 1948.

[67] Several government ministers of Argentina have received their degrees at UBA, such as the foreign ministers José Luis Murature, Ángel Gallardo (also a Rector of UBA), Bonifacio del Carril, Miguel Ángel Zavala Ortiz, Juan Atilio Bramuglia, Susana Ruiz Cerutti, Guido di Tella, Adalberto Rodríguez Giavarini, Carlos Ruckauf, and Santiago Cafiero.

Economy ministers of diverse political views and pertaining to different economic schools of thought have also earned their degrees at UBA; among them José Martínez de Hoz, Roberto Lavagna, Axel Kicillof, and Nicolás Dujovne.

Carlos Saavedra Lamas, noted academic and jurist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1936, earned his law degree at UBA and served as rector of the university from 1941 to 1943.

Houssay's work was carried out at the UBA-affiliated Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental, while Milstein received degree from the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences.

[74] Other prominent physicians educated at UBA include public sanitarist Ramón Carrillo, Teresa Ratto, surgeon Juan Rosai, Luis Agote, dentist Ricardo Guardo (credited as the founder of the UBA Faculty of Dentistry), geneticist Primarosa Chieri, and pharmacologist Augusto Claudio Cuello, professor at McGill University in Canada.

Unicorn startups founded by the University of Buenos Aires's alumni raised the most money in venture capital funding in the Latin American region in 2020.

[78] A number of prominent scientists in diverse fields have been educated at the University of Buenos Aires; many of them have also taught classes and have conducted research at UBA.

Patricia Ortúzar, geographist and vice chair of the Antarctic Committee for Environmental Protection, also received her degree from the University of Buenos Aires.

[85] Other prominent UBA scientists include pioneering computer scientist Cecilia Berdichevsky,[86] ecologist Enrique Chaneton, molecular biologist Alberto Kornblihtt,[87] physicist Beatriz Susana Cougnet de Roederer,[88] biologist María Fernanda Ceriani,[89] solar physicist and former CONICET president, Marta Graciela Rovira,[90] and Emma Pérez Ferreira, first female president of Argentina's National Atomic Energy Commission.

Raúl Prebisch, creator of the Prebisch–Singer hypothesis and a major proponent of dependency theory, studied economy at the Faculty of Economic Sciences.

[92] Social anthropologist Esther Hermitte, credited with introducing structural-functionalist anthropology in Argentina, was a Faculty of Philosophy and Letters alumna, as was post-marxist theorist Ernesto Laclau.

[96] In the field of psychoanalysis, Faculty of Psychology alumna Alicia Beatriz Casullo is known for being the founder and first head of the Sociedad Argentina de Psicoanálisis.

[99] Other known UBA-educated architects include Claudio Vekstein, organic architecture proponent Patricio Pouchulu, and the Uruguayan Rafael Viñoly, who designed the Cero+infinito building at the Ciudad Universitaria complex, finished in 2022.

[101] The poet and critic Jorge Fondebrider studied literature at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, and later served as director of the UBA-owned Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas.

After receiving a degree in Natural Sciences from the university, Alicia Jurado wrote biographies of William Henry Hudson, Cunninghame Graham, and Jorge Luis Borges.