I sometimes wonder if it is worth drawing lines and generating comparisons between two seemingly disparate processes that are at work at different scales, and in different countries, but why not – I’m jetlagged with some late night time to spare.

First, the US Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) released a new report (Findings from the 2009 CGS International Graduate Admissions Survey, Phase III: Final Offers of Admissions and Enrollment), and associated press release, that flags the challenges the US has in attracting foreign students at the levels it once did. The full report (from which Figure 1 to the right is taken) is definitely worth reading. This segment of the final paragraph particularly caught my eye:

Despite the high quality of graduate education in the United States, we cannot continue to assume that our institutions are the number one destination of international graduate students. In the last three years, growth in the numbers of international graduate students coming to the United States has slowed, and now the numbers have flat lined, even though global student mobility has rapidly increased over the last decade. Given this new reality, policymakers and the graduate school community are faced with several key questions if the United States is to remain the destination of choice for international graduate students: Are there national policies that deter international students from coming to the United States for graduate school? How do we make U.S. graduate programs attractive to both domestic and international students? Within the constraints of the current economic situation, what can institutions do to more effectively attract international students to their graduate programs? And, what lessons can we learn from the successes of colleges and universities in other countries in attracting international students to their graduate programs?

Meanwhile, I was reading the Guardian’s Tuesday education insert today, and one faculty vacancy advertisement also caught my eye: University College London (UCL) “wishes to appoint an International Relations Lecturer to contribute to research and teaching on the MSc in International Public Policy within the Department of Political Science/School of Public Policy“.  Given my interest in international/global public policy, I read through the advertisement to see what the new hire would have to teach, and came across an interesting number:

UCL is a multi-faculty college of the University of London with a population of over 17,000 students from more than 130 different countries. It is ranked by the Times Higher as one of the top five universities worldwide. Founded in 2005, the Department of Political Science has quickly established itself as a leading international centre for political research and came 6th in the UK in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) organised by the British Higher Education Funding Councils – 3rd in terms of the percentage of research deemed to be ‘world leading’ (20%) and ‘internationally excellent’ (45%). It is the only department in the UK centred on graduate teaching and research, and currently has almost 400 Masters students on its programmes.

Nearly 400 (and rising) Masters students from around the world, in a new graduate student only department.  Thus, across the Atlantic, albeit at two vastly different scales, we see flat-lining if not decline (in the US) versus rapid expansion (in UCL, London, UK).  Of course this is but one department’s experience, though I have seen broader signs that the UK has seen significant growth in graduate programmes, including at the Masters level.

Now, if you really wanted to unpack the developmental dynamic further, you would have to explore issues like the context (London, a global city which is also situated within the European Higher Education Area), the national system (which incentivizes departments to create one year taught Masters programs), an emerging sense that higher education is an export industry in the UK, and so on.  But let’s also burrow down to the level of academic practice, as captured in this advertisement, and ask this question: how do faculty members in UK universities like UCL or Oxford or King’s College London balance the need to generate revenue via taught Masters programmes, with the imperative to conduct ever more innovative research (which ideally needs to generate ’societal impact’ as well), all the while supporting increasingly large numbers of graduate students?

And where do they put them?! By my count this particular department has 16 faculty (17 with this hire), 13 teaching fellows (3 with PhD) and “almost 400” masters students. This equals 25 MA/MSc students per faculty member, or 21 per PhD holder.

I know the quality of higher education is high in the UK, and is likely excellent in this particular department, but are these numbers and proportions (students/faculty) typical at the UK level, manageable for faculty, and reflective of the attractiveness of one year Masters programs (which are not at all common in the US)?

Moreover, are learning outcomes of such programs on par across national boundaries (e.g., the UK versus the US or the Netherlands), and do PhD applicants (e.g., from the US to the UK, or from the UK to the US) come to their PhD programs from the MA/MSc with equitable levels of knowledge and capabilities, all things equal?

If so, then places like the UK (and UCL) are doing something right, and the US can perhaps learn from the UK experience.

If not, however, then it might be time to ask other questions about the nature and implications (especially with respect to quality) of the rapid growth of Masters degrees in London, and the UK more generally.

Can we learn from London, and if so what?

Kris Olds

Numbers, partnerships, linkages, and collaboration: some key terms that seem to be bubbling up all over the place right now.

On the numbers front, the ever active Cliff Adelman released, via the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), a new report titled The Spaces Between Numbers: Getting International Data on Higher Education Straight (November 2009). As the IHEP press release notes:

The research report, The Spaces Between Numbers: Getting International Data on Higher Education Straight, reveals that U.S. graduation rates remain comparable to those of other developed countries despite news stories about our nation losing its global competitiveness because of slipping college graduation rates. The only major difference—the data most commonly highlighted, but rarely understood—is the categorization of graduation rate data. The United States measures its attainment rates by “institution” while other developed nations measure their graduation rates by “system.”

The main target audience of this new report seems to be the OECD, though we (as users) of international higher ed data can all benefit from a good dig through the report. Adelman’s core objective is facilitating the creation of a new generation of indicators, indicators that are a lot more meaningful and policy-relevant than those that currently exist.

Second, Universities UK (UUK) released a data-laden report titled The impact of universities on the UK economy. As the press release notes:

Universities in the UK now generate £59 billion for the UK economy putting the higher education sector ahead of the agricultural, advertising, pharmaceutical and postal industries, according to new figures published today.

This is the key finding of Universities UK’s latest UK-wide study of the impact of the higher education sector on the UK economy. The report – produced for Universities UK by the University of Strathclyde – updates earlier studies published in 1997, 2002 and 2006 and confirms the growing economic importance of the sector.

The study found that, in 2007/08:

• The higher education sector spent some £19.5 billion on goods and services produced in the UK.
• Through both direct and secondary or multiplier effects this generated over £59 billion of output and over 668,500 full time equivalent jobs throughout the economy. The equivalent figure four years ago was nearly £45 billion (25% increase).
• The total revenue earned by universities amounted to £23.4 billion (compared with £16.87 billion in 2003/04).
• Gross export earnings for the higher education sector were estimated to be over £5.3 billion.
• The personal off-campus expenditure of international students and visitors amounted to £2.3 billion.

Professor Steve Smith, President of Universities UK, said: “These figures show that the higher education sector is one of the UK’s most valuable industries. Our universities are unquestionably an outstanding success story for the economy.

See pp 16-17 regarding a brief discussion of the impact of international student flows into the UK system.

These two reports are interesting examples of contributions to the debate about the meaning and significance of higher education vis a vis relative growth and decline at a global scale, and the value of a key (ostensibly under-recognized) sector of the national (in this case UK) economy.

And third, numbers, viewed from the perspectives of pattern and trend identification, were amply evident in a new Thomson Reuters’ report (CHINA: Research and Collaboration in the New Geography of Science) co-authored by the data base crunchers from Evidence Ltd., a Leeds-based firm and recent Thomson Reuters acquisition. One valuable aspect of this report is that it unpacks the broad trends, and flags key disciplinary and institutional geographies to China’s new geography of science. As someone who worked at the National University of Singapore (NUS) for four years, I can understand why NUS is now China’s No.1 institutional collaborator (see p. 9), though the why issues are not discussed in this type of broad mapping cum PR report for Evidence & Thomson Reuters.

Shifting tack, two new releases about international double and joint degrees — one (The Graduate International Collaborations Project: A North American Perspective on Joint and Dual Degree Programs) by the North American Council of Graduate Schools (CGS), and one (Joint and Double Degree Programs: An Emerging Model for Transatlantic Exchange) by the International Institute for Education (IIE) and the Freie Universität Berlin — remind us of the emerging desire to craft more focused, intense and ‘deep’ relations between universities versus the current approach which amounts to the promiscuous acquisition of hundreds if not thousands of memoranda of understanding (MoUs).

The IIE/Freie Universität Berlin book (link here for the table of contents) addresses various aspects of this development process:

The book seeks to provide practical recommendations on key challenges, such as communications, sustainability, curriculum design, and student recruitment. Articles are divided into six thematic sections that assess the development of collaborative degree programs from beginning to end. While the first two sections focus on the theories underpinning transatlantic degree programs and how to secure institutional support and buy-in, the third and fourth sections present perspectives on the beginning stages of a joint or double degree program and the issue of program sustainability. The last two sections focus on profiles of specific transatlantic degree programs and lessons learned from joint and double degree programs in the European context.

It is clear that international joint and double degrees are becoming a genuine phenomenon; so much so that key institutions including the IIE, the CGS, and the EU are all paying close attention to the degrees’ uses, abuses, and efficacy. Thus we should view this new book as an attempt to both promote, but in a manner that examines the many forces that shape the collaborative process across space and between institutions. International partnerships are not simple to create, yet they are being demanded by more and more stakeholders.  Why?  Dissatisfaction that the rhetoric of ‘internationalization’ does not match up to the reality, and there is a ‘deliverables’ problem.

Indeed, we hosted some senior Chinese university officials here in Madison several months ago and they used the term “ghost MoUs”, reflecting their dissatisfaction with filling filing cabinet after filing cabinet with signed MoUs that lead to absolutely nothing. In contrast, engagement via joint and double degrees, for example, or other forms of partnership (e.g., see International partnerships: a legal guide for universities), cannot help but deepen the level of connection between institutions of higher education on a number of levels. It is easy to ignore a MoU, but not so easy to ignore a bilateral scheme with clearly defined deliverables, a timetable for assessment, and a budget.

The value of tangible forms of international collaboration was certainly on view when I visited Brandeis University earlier this week.  Brandeis’ partnership with Al-Quds University (in Jerusalem) links “an Arab institution in Jerusalem and a Jewish-sponsored institution in the United States in an exchange designed to foster cultural understanding and provide educational opportunities for students, faculty and staff.”  Projects undertaken via the partnership have included administrative exchanges, academic exchanges, teaching and learning projects, and partnership documentation (an important but often forgotten about activity). The level of commitment to the partnership at Brandeis was genuinely impressive.

In the end, as debates about numbers, rankings, partnerships, MoUs — internationalization more generally — show us, it is only when we start grinding through the details and ‘working at the coal face’ (like Brandeis and Al-Quds seem to be doing), though in a strategic way, can we really shift from rhetoric to reality.

Kris Olds

Yesterday, Canada unveiled a report assessing the economic contributions that international students make to the country. Entitled Economic Impact of International Education in Canada, the report was presented by Stockwell Day, the Minister of International Trade and Minister for the Asia-Pacific Gateway, at a meeting of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC).

Highlights from the report include the following:

• In 2008, international students to Canada contributed $6.5 billion (CAD) to the national economy, provided 83,000 jobs, and contributed $291 million (CAD) in government revenue
• This estimate is based on tuition fee payments, accommodation costs, and discretionary spending for international students from the K-12 to post-secondary levels
• While all provinces receive incoming students and report financial gain, Ontario and Quebec receive the lion’s share, with nearly two-thirds of all international students coming to Canada going to these two provinces
• Nearly 40% of all revenue comes from the top two source countries: China and South Korea
• The total value of international education is higher than the value of national exports in coniferous lumber ($5.1 billion) and coal ($6.07 billion)

Three other entries have recently been made on this blog on similar research conducted in different national contexts: Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. That Canada has joined these countries in the calculative process of determining the economic value of international education is significant for a few reasons.

First, while the state has multiple rationales underlying its promotion of international student mobility – ranging from international diplomatic and academic exchange ideals, to generating both short and long-term as well as direct and indirect economic benefits – the public discourse in Canada has hitherto tended to emphasize education as a (largely) publically-funded sector. In commissioning a report that emphasizes the economic contributions of international students, and the relative economic contribution of education services (e.g., see Table 15 from the report below), the Government of Canada seems to be showing a growing willingness to frame international education as an emerging export industry.

Second, education is a provincial responsibility in Canada, so policies and initiatives have tended to be decentralized. The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade’s (DFAIT) interest in developing a national agenda for international education has been manifest in the past few years, most clearly evidenced with the launch of the “Education in-au Canada” branding campaign last year. In commissioning a report that quantifies the overall export industry’s value, one can assume that this report serves in part to support the continued inclusion of education as a component of DFAIT’s Global Commerce Strategy. Moreover, the report prominently displays the financial contributions that international students make to provincial government revenues, a distinction that I have not seen made in other reports. One can further speculate that this inclusion is due to continued debates within and between various levels of government on the value of supporting the expansion of international education. (It should be noted that the report also says the provinces of British Columbia, Manitoba, and Nova Scotia had previously conducted similar research on their own.)

Lastly, it is worth reflecting on the fact that the report was commissioned by DFAIT but prepared by Roslyn Kunin & Associates, Inc., a private consultancy firm. As GlobalHigherEd has noted in previous entries on this topic (e.g., on New Zealand), other jurisdictions have adopted similar arrangements, but this still raises questions about private firms acting as knowledge brokers for the state, producing reports that can act both as analytical devices and lobbying tools. Given that each of the national reports reviewed on GlobalHigherEd are drawn from very different data sources and based on different modeling techniques, it also raises questions about the international comparability of such figures, and their potential role in benchmarking a country’s position vis-à-vis “competitor states” in the global international education market. For example, Canada’s report (that was produced from secondary data sources) cites annual contributions as $6.1 billion (CAD), whereas the US returns (as noted in a previous entry) are calculated to be $15.5 billion/yr (USD). Considering that some estimates put the United States as receiving 22.8% of all internationally mobile students, while Canada receives just 3%, there are clearly different data, assumptions, and perhaps intentions, underlining these reports.

Kate Geddie

Source: Adams, J, King, C., and Singh, V. (2009) INDIA: Research and collaboration in the new geography of science, October, Leeds: Evidence Ltd/Thomson Reuters, p. 5.

The emergence of new supra-national movements with respect to higher education and research continue apace.  From the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), through to international consortia of universities, through to bits of universities embedded in others within distant territories (e.g., Georgia Tech’s unit within the National University of Singapore), the higher education landscape is in the process of being reconfigured and globalized. Yet, is it really that novel in an historical sense?

Today’s call at the East Asian Summit for the revival of Nalanda University (see below) draws upon development outcomes in higher education that took place well before the establishment of medieval universities like Oxford, Bologna, or Lund. As Sashi Tahroor notes:

Founded in 427 A.D. by Buddhist monks at the time of Kumaragupta I (415-455 A.D.), Nalanda was an extraordinary centre of learning for seven centuries. The name probably comes from a combination of nalam (lotus, the symbol of knowledge) and da, meaning “to give”, so Nalanda means “Giver of Knowledge”. And that is exactly what the university did, attracting prize students from all over India, as well as from China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Persia, Sri Lanka, Tibet and Turkey. At its peak, Nalanda played host to more than 10,000 students — not just Buddhists, but of various religious traditions — and its education, provided in its heyday by 2,000 world-renowned professors, was completely free.

The establishment of new types of universities in like Nalanda University, Øresund University, or the recently opened Universidade Federal da Integração Latino-Americana (UNILA), remind us that there is an emerging desire for novel spaces of knowledge production that think and act beyond the nation.  A related question, then, is how effective will these new configurations be, and can supporting stakeholders (including nation-states) really act beyond the nation?

Kris Olds

Source: Martin, R. (2009) ‘Who Killed Canada’s Education Advantage? A forensic investigation into the disappearance of public education investment in Canada‘, The Walrus, 20 October.

Editor’s note: Link to the title above for the full article. Roger Martin is Dean, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. The Walrus is a Canadian news magazine.

GlobalHigherEd was established in the Fall of 2007 at the start of a wonderful year long sabbatical at Sciences Po in Paris (for Kris), and an inspiring four month long visiting professorship at the University of Amsterdam (for Susan).  Alas our ‘regular’ schedules are relatively hectic now so we are attempting to be creative with less frequent entries, the utilization of periodic guest entries, and so on.

On this note, today marks the start of a GlobalHigherEd Twitter service.  Those of you who wish to keep up with briefer notices regarding interesting reports, debates, events, and so on, should subscribe to: http://twitter.com/globalhighered, and/or keep an eye on the Twitter widget to the right (just below our visitor location map) which will simultaneously profile our ‘mini’ contributions, and allow you to track/link without subscribing.

The Twitter service is designed to complement (not replace) GlobalHigherEd, lay some practical groundwork for longer entries in our weblog, and act as a relatively immediate funnel for information regarding the globalization of higher education and research for the ‘knowledge economy’.

With all best wishes,

Kris Olds & Susan Robertson

October 14, 2009

The National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Taj network has expanded to the Global Ring Network for Advanced Application Development (GLORIAD), wrapping another ring of light around the northern hemisphere for science and education. Taj now connects India, Singapore, Vietnam and Egypt to the GLORIAD global infrastructure and dramatically improves existfing U.S. network links with China and the Nordic region.

Taj promises far-reaching, stimulative and sustainable benefits in global research and education (R&E) collaboration. It will serve every knowledge disciplines from high energy physics, atmospheric and climate change science, to renewable energy research, to nuclear nonproliferation, genomics and medicine, economics and history. The population of countries served by the NSF-sponsored GLORIAD program, funded since 1997, now exceeds half the globe.

In a unique public/private partnership with NSF, Tata Communications is providing a new billion bits per second (Gbps) service connecting science and education exchange points in Hong Kong, Singapore, Alexandria, Mumbai, Amsterdam and Copenhagen (valued at $6 million) to interconnect vital national research and education networks in India and across Southeast Asia, including Singapore and Vietnam.

The new exchange point in Alexandria, Egypt affords new possibilities for science and education ties throughout the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia and the Caucasus regions. Taj opens up new horizons for U.S. scientists, educators and students, enabling direct access to key research facilities in India, and, through new exchange points in Egypt and Singapore, improved connectivity for potentially millions of end-users conducting international collaborative research….  [Link here for the full press release]

Source: National Science Foundation, NSF’s Cyber-Network Now Expands Across the Northern Hemisphere and Connects Half the Globe, Press Release 09-200.

Over the last several weeks more questions about the changing nature of the relative position of national higher education and research systems have emerged.  These questions have often been framed around the notion that the US higher education system (assuming there is one system) might be in relative decline, that flagship UK universities (national champions?) like Oxford are unable to face challenges given the constraints facing them, and that universities from ‘emerging’ regions (East and South Asia, in particular) are ‘rising’ due to the impact of continual or increasing investment in higher education and research.

Select examples of such contributions include this series in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

• ‘America Falling: Longtime Dominance in Education Erodes‘ (Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 October 2009)
• ‘Asia Rising: Countries Funnel Billions Into Universities‘ (Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 October 2009)
• ‘Asian Universities on the Rise: a Comparison With U.S. Institutions‘ (Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 October 2009)
• ‘Scientific Research: Asian Countries Expand, U.S. Holds Steady‘ (Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 October 2009)
• ‘Singapore: Teaming Up With Foreign Universities for Innovative Research‘ (Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 October 2009)
• ‘China: Attract Talent First, and Outstanding Universities Will Follow‘, (Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 October 2009)
• ‘South Korea: Government Support for Research Builds Industries‘, (Chronicle of Higher Education, 5 October 2009)

and these articles associated with the much debated THE-QS World University Rankings 2009:

• ‘Rankings 09: Asia advances‘ (Times Higher Education, 8 October 2009)
• ‘UK boosts standing but Asian countries ’snap at our heels”, (Times Higher Education, 8 October 2009)
• ‘Rankings 09: Beacons of excellence‘, (Times Higher Education, 8 October 2009)

The above articles and graphics in US and UK higher education media outlets were preceded by this working paper:

• ‘The Global Competition For Talent: The Rapidly Changing Market for International Students and the Need for a Strategic Approach in the US‘ (by John Aubrey Douglass and Richard Edelstein, Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California – Berkeley, October 2009)

a US report titled:

• Sizing Up the Competition: The Future of International Postsecondary Student Enrollment in the United States (by the American Council on Education, September 2009)

and one UK report titled:

• International Benchmarking Study of UK Research Performance 2009 (by Evidence Ltd., a Thomson Reuters business, for the UK Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, September 2009)

There are, of course, many other calls for increased awareness, or deep and critical reflection.  For example, back in June 2009, four congressional leaders in the USA:

asked the National Academies to form a distinguished panel to assess the competitive position of the nation’s research universities. “America’s research universities are admired throughout the world, and they have contributed immeasurably to our social and economic well-being,” the Members of Congress said in a letter delivered today. “We are concerned that they are at risk.”….

The bipartisan congressional group asked that the Academies’ panel answer the following question: “What are the top ten actions that Congress, state governments, research universities, and others could take to assure the ability of the American research university to maintain the excellence in research and doctoral education needed to help the United States compete, prosper, and achieve national goals for health, energy, the environment, and security in the global community of the 21st century?”

Recall that the US National Academies produced a key 2005 report (Rising Above the Gathering Storm) “which in turn was the basis for the “America COMPETES Act.” This Act created a blueprint for doubling funding for basic research, improving the teaching of math and science, and taking other steps to make the U.S. more competitive.” On this note see our 16 June 2008 entry titled ‘Surveying US dominance in science and technology for the Secretary of Defense‘.

Taken together, these contributions are but a sample of the many expressions of concern being expressed in 2009 in the Global North (especially the US & UK) about the changing geography of the global higher education and research landscape.

These types of articles and reports shed light, but can also raise anxiety levels (as they are sometimes designed to do).  The better of them attempt to ensure that the angsts being felt in the long dominant Global North are viewed with a critical eye, and that people realize that this is not a “zero-sum game” (as Philip Altbach puts it in the Chronicle’s ‘America Falling: Longtime Dominance in Education Erodes‘). For example, the shifting terrain of global research productivity is partially a product of increasing volumes of collaboration and human mobility across borders, while key global challenges are just that – global in nature and impossible to attend to unless global teams of relatively equitable capacities are put together. Moreover, greater transnational education and research activity and experience arguably facilitates a critical disposition towards the most alarmist material, while concurrently reinforcing the point that the world is changing, albeit very unevenly, and that there are also many positive changes associated with a more dispersed higher education and research landscape.

We’ll do our best to post links to new global mappings like these as they emerge in the future.  Please ensure you let us know what is being published, be it rigorous, critical, analytical, alarmist, self-congratulatory, etc., and we’ll profile it on GlobalHigherEd.  The production of discourses on this new global higher education and research landscape is a key component of the process of change itself.  Thus we need to be concerned not just with the content of such mappings, but also the logics underlying the production of such mappings, and the institutional relations that bring such mappings into view for consumption.

Kris Olds

Well, an email arrived today and I just could not help myself…I clicked on the THE-QS World University Rankings 2009 links that were provided to see who received what ranking.  In addition, I did a quick Google scan of news outlets and weblogs to see what spins were already underway.

The THE-QS ranking seems to have become the locomotive for the Times Higher Education, a higher education newsletter that is published in the UK once per week.  In contrast to the daily Chronicle of Higher Education, and the daily Inside Higher Ed (both based in the US), the Times Higher Education seems challenged to provide quality content of some depth even on its relatively lax once per week schedule.  I spent four years in the UK in the mid-1990s, and can’t help but note the decline in the quality of the coverage of UK higher education news over the last decade plus.

It seems as if the Times Higher has decided to allocate most of its efforts to promoting the creation and propagation of this global ranking scheme in contrast to providing detailed, analytical, and critical coverage of issues in the UK, let alone in the European Higher Education Area. Six steady years of rankings generate attention, advertising revenue, and enhance some aspects of power and perceived esteem.  But, in the end, where is the Times Higher in analyzing the forces shaping the systems in which all of these universities are embedded, or the complex forces shaping university development strategies?  Rather, we primarily seem to get increasingly thin articles, based on relatively limited original research, heaps of advertising (especially jobs), and now regular build-ups to the annual rankings frenzy. In addition, their partnership with QS Quacquarelli Symonds is leading to new regional rankings; a clear form of market-making at a new unexploited geographic scale.  Of course there are some useful insights generated by rankings, but the rankings attention is arguably making the Times Higher lazier and dare I say, irresponsible, given the increasing significance of higher education to modern societies and economies.

In addition, I continue to be intrigued by how UK-based analysts and institutions seem infatuated with the term “international”, as if it necessarily means better quality than “national”. See, for example, the “international” elements of the current ranking in the figure below:

Leaving aside my problems with the limited scale of the survey numbers (9,386 academics represent the “world’s” academics?; 3,281 firm representatives represent the “world’s” employers?), and the approach to weighting, why does the proportion of “international” faculty and students necessarily enhance the quality of university life?

Some universities, especially in Australasia and the UK, seek high proportions of international students to compensate for declining levels of government support, and weak levels of extramural funding via research income (which provides streams of income via overhead charges). Thus the higher number of international students may be, in some cases, inversely related to the quality of the university or the health of the public higher education system in which the university is embedded.

In addition, in some contexts, universities are legally required to limit “non-resident” student intake given the nature of the higher education system in place.  But in the metrics used here universities with the incentives and the freedom to let in large numbers of foreign students , for reasons other than the quality of said students, are rewarded with a higher rank.

The discourse of “international” is elevated here, much like it was in the last Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in the UK, with “international” codeword for higher quality.  But international is just that – international – and it means nothing more than that unless we assess how good they (international students and faculty) are, what they contribute to the educational experience, and what lasting impacts they generate.

In any case, the THE-QS rankings are out.  The relative position of universities in the rankings will be debated about, and used to provide legitimacy for new or previously unrecognized claims. But it’s really the methodology that needs to be unpacked, as well as the nature and logics of the rankers, versus just the institutions that are being ranked.

Kris Olds