The admission and academic leveling processes in public Higher Education Institutions (IES) in Ecuador are currently regulated by various criteria, which has led to countless new developments that have somehow increased the enrollment rates. Dropout of university students in various majors. The objective of this research process was to analyze the results of the “SER ESTUDIANTE” exam applied to high school students from the Sierra regime in 2022 for the formation of academic clusters that allow HEIs to manage the allocation of places and resources in the two processes of admission and university leveling. For this, a cross-sectional quantitative study was proposed in which graph theory and social network analysis were used to verify whether the formation of these clusters could facilitate the segmentation of public university admission and leveling processes. Among the main results obtained, the influence that social network analysis has on the formation of academic clusters and how these can be grouped for admission or university leveling purposes stands out.
