Introduction: Metabolic syndrome (MS) is defined as a set of conditions including high blood pressure, dyslipidemia, glucose intolerance and visceral obesity. In recent years, an increase of obesity in university students has been observed, although the accurate prevalence of MS is unknown.Objective: To determine the prevalence of MS in university students between January 2000 and January 2016.Materials and methods: A systematic review of studies published in the PubMed, LILACS, ScienceDirect, UpToDate, Imbiomed, SciELO and Google Scholar databases was performed. To ensure the highest number of papers, different combinations of words related to MS were used in Spanish, English, and Portuguese.Results: A total of 16 studies met the inclusion criteria. Students from different health, social and human sciences careers from America, Asia and Europe participated in said studies. The prevalence of MS ranged from 0 to 19.2% according to NCEP-ATP III.Conclusions: The prevalence of MS varies widely across studies. It is important to expand MS research, as this would allow designing specific interventions for high-risk groups in the university context.