International Benchmarking in UK Higher Education

1. International Benchmarking in UK Higher Education HESA International Benchmarking Conference 20th July 2011

2. Business drivers for international benchmarking Benchmarking is not an end in itself. It is worth doing to: • Support universities’ internationalisation strategies and plans • Understand relative strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats • Inform decisions about objectives, priorities and targets • Manage international performance, through relevant KPIs:

3. Available resources for international benchmarking • There is a plethora of public and proprietary resources available for international HE benchmarking: • Global league tables and institutional rankings • Cross-country institutional process comparisons • Proprietary analyses of institutional performance • Reviews of international and national market trends and intelligence • Sources of national market data • New initiatives and developments • IMPI • U-Map and U-multirank • EUMIDA

4. Caveat emptor! • There are real dangers from taking international data sources at face value, re: • Comparability • Comprehensiveness • Timeliness • Methodologies

5. Experiences from UK institutions • UK universities vary greatly in their use of international benchmarking. • Feedback from institutions highlighted: • Widely differing levels of maturity in internationalisation • Intra-national rather than international comparators • Ambivalence over international league tables • Benefits from mission-specific ‘drill down’ • Value of collaborations and partnerships • Information gaps, e.g. employability

6. Conclusions • International benchmarking is an evolving science and art for UK higher education. • Priorities for institutions should include: • Adopting a genuinely international perspective • Tailoring approaches to business priorities • Identifying relevant, reliable information sources • Collaborative development of better resources and shared learning