One maddening thing about universities is that so much of what they claim to value is so badly measured.  Take internationalization.  Usually, this gets measured by the number or proportion of international students, which is ludicrously reductive given the extent to which in many countries international students are primarily income sources; occasionally, you might get some information about the number of foreign faculty.  Maybe.  But that’s it.  Anything deeper on internationalization is usually judged to be unmeasurable, so there is no way that an institution’s results can be usefully benchmarked.

But a couple of weeks ago, a UK consultancy called Education Insight published a new rating of UK institutions with respect to internationalization.  You may have seen the University World News piece on it: but the actual rating itself – called the Global Engagement Index –  is right here.  It’s very cool, so I thought I would spend today looking at it.

(Disclosure: Education Insight’s principal, Janet Ilieva, and I have worked together on projects such as this one on Internationalization in Latin American higher education for the British Council and we are also both members of the Global Impact Institute, a higher education firm which is headed by the fabulous Uwe Brandenburg that focuses at Internationalization and Impact Assessment in higher education.   So, a) take this with whatever-sized grain of salt you deem appropriate and b) if you’re looking at any big internationalization projects, give us – or more accurately Uwe – a shout.)

Anyways, the index is composed of two broad sets of measures: student engagement and institutional infrastructure.  The student index looks at the student body itself – not just the proportion of international students but the diversity of countries from which a university’s student body is drawn.  It also looks at the number of students taught abroad (that is, via transnational education arrangements), the success/completion rate of international students and their graduate labour market outcomes.  So, it’s not just about numbers, it’s about where they come from and how they do.  There is also a fascinating set of measures on study abroad and “internationalization at home”: which is partly about language teaching, but also about “international themes within the curricula” which is calculated by looking at the number of courses an institution offers where the title suggests an “international” or “global” theme. 

The institutional infrastructure index is maybe even more interesting.   It looks at international staff, which is simple enough.  But it also looks at international academic collaborations – particularly collaborations with institutions in developing nations – and its sustainability (including the institution’s carbon footprint, which is often quite significant for institutions with overseas operations).  Cool, huh?

I suppose one could quibble re: whether the index’s two focus on students vs. institutions is right (there is no overall rating, institutions get rated separately on each though there is a fair correlation between the two).  You could quibble over whether the eight sub-indexes make sense, or the couple of dozen individual indicators.  Quibbling is, after all, the main thing people in higher education like to do when it comes to rankings. 

But, two things: first: this is a comprehensive and good-faith effort, unlinked to any of the big commercial ranking outfits, to try to help institutions understand how they compare with others.  And second – here is my inner Canadian kicking in – holy sweet mother of God can you believe all this data is actually publicly available?  Not all for free – my understanding is that Education insight had to pay for some of it – but who cares?  The data exists!  It really exists!  From third party providers in a common format and not through tedious poking through each institution’s idiosyncratically-compiled data. 

Just for fun, I present here the data in the Global Education Index and whether it is nationally collected in Canada. 

Category	UK Data Source	Available in Canada?
International Student Numbers (include Market Diversity, % from developing countries)	Higher Education Statistics Agency Student Record	Statistics Canada’s Post-Secondary Student Information System (PSIS) (requires payment)
Transnational Student Numbers	Higher Education Statistics Agency Offshore Student Record	Canadians do not track this
Success rates of international students	Higher Education Statistics Agency Student Record	Theoretically available from PSIS but would cost a fortune and no one has done it.
International Student Satisfaction	National Student Survey	Does not exist. Theoretically possible through sporadic and incomplete CUSC and NSSE surveys, but no one has ever done it.
Labour Force Outcomes of International Students	2017-18 Graduate Outcomes Survey	Yeeeeeah, no.
Proportion of Students with Study Abroad Experience	Contained in the Higher Education Statistics Agency student record	Is not contained in the PSIS record, and universities can’t be bothered to collect data on their own, so we can’t do this either
Proportion of short-term exchange students	Contained in the Higher Education Statistics Agency student record	Lol. No.
International Themes in the Curriculum	The student record contains the names of every course a student takes, so it’s a pain, but this info is analyzable	To Statscan’s credit, PSIS was supposed to contain this info, but institutions couldn’t be bothered to fill it in, so we don’t have this info
Proportion of International Staff	Contained in the Higher Education Statistics Agency staff record	I don’t think this is in Statscan’s U-CASS, but some institutions do report it to rankings agencies like THE and QS.
Institutional Sustainability	There is (or was actually a ranking on this in the UK): https://peopleandplanet.org/university-league	Definitely no.
Staff Air Travel Carbon Footprint	Higher Education Statistics Agency Estates Management Record	BWHAHAHAHAH. No.
Fee Waivers for Students from Developing Countries	Higher Education Statistics Agency Student record	OMG, no.
Collaboration with researchers from developing countries	Available through various bibliometric means	No one have ever done this, to my knowledge, but quite possible
Research/Contract income from outside the country	Higher Education Statistics Agency Business and Community Interaction Survey	Hehehe…hahaha…snort…oh, mercy.
Impact of Research done in collaboration with foreign researchers	Biblometrics again	Doable but not done

I’ve said it before and will say it probably until the day I die.  Canada – its governments and its universities together – are completely unserious when it comes to using data to monitor and improve the system.  And this very cool little data product, put together in the UK in a few months by a small consultancy, but which in Canada is utterly impossible, shows why.