International Strategy for Higher Education Institutions
International Strategy for Higher Education Institutions
News and Views 
This News and Views page is my Blog.
I use it to:
This page shows the ten most recent blog articles. A complete list of all articles since the blog started in May 2014 can be found on the Blog Archive page.
Posted on 23 Apr 2025 at 16:51 by Vicky Lewis
The twelve-part series of blogs I recently completed, exploring the international KPIs of UK universities, wasn’t supposed to be a blog series.
Here’s how it started.
Back in May 2024, I had a lull in consultancy projects. I’d stepped away from work for a month in April to sort out my late mum’s writings, letters and other mementos. And it took a while for new projects to start coming through again.
I decided to take the opportunity to get on with some research I’d been mulling over for a while. What started out as an analysis of the international KPIs in post-pandemic strategic plans turned into an exploration of UK universities’ international strategies and how success is measured at that, more detailed, level.
When I started out, I planned to turn this into a report for the sector (a follow up to my 2021 Global Strategies Report, but this time homing in on the specific topic of KPIs).
I did the analysis, worked out my report structure, and drafted a context-setting introduction (though a general election was called and the context seemed likely to change before I’d finished writing the report).
Then the consultancy work picked up again from June. I had less time and was struggling to focus on writing this new report alongside the consultancy.
Posted on 9 Apr 2025 at 16:55 by Vicky Lewis
This is the twelfth and, you'll be relieved to hear, final blog in my series sharing insights and emerging ideas on ways to measure international success, based on a review of university international strategies. Links to earlier blogs in the series are provided at the end of this one.
In this final blog, I review some of the constructive and insightful comments made when I’ve shared my KPI blogs on LinkedIn. It was truly gratifying that this series stimulated such lively debate and I appreciate that so many of you took the time to share your own observations.
I’m going to go through each of the thematic blogs in turn.
Posted on 2 Apr 2025 at 17:37 by Vicky Lewis
This is the eleventh in my series of blogs sharing insights and emerging ideas on ways to measure international success, based on a review of university international strategies. Links to earlier blogs in the series are provided at the end of this one.
I’d intended this to be a final, wrap-up blog to this series but I’m going to split the wrapping up over two blogs as there’s still a lot I’d like to say. And a 12-part series feels more complete than an 11-parter!
So, in this blog, I’ll flag up some missing metrics, then throw a spanner in the works by exploring the question of whether KPIs are even useful. Do we really need to measure everything?
Blog number 12 will provide an overview of key learning points from the series and some concluding observations.
Posted on 26 Mar 2025 at 18:16 by Vicky Lewis
This is the tenth in my series of blogs sharing insights and emerging ideas on ways to measure international success, based on a review of university international strategies. Links to earlier blogs in the series are provided at the end of this one.
Despite well-rehearsed reservations about the commercial global rankings, these are often used (by institutions and their stakeholders) as a measure of reputation and a marker of prestige.
I was amused to find out recently that the term ‘prestige’ used to be a synonym for ‘practising juggling or sleight of hand’, and is derived from a Latin adjective meaning ‘full of tricks’ or ‘deceitful’.
It can feel as if institutions are ‘practising sleight of hand’ when they focus on optimising specific metrics simply to climb the rankings; and the rankings agencies open themselves up to accusations of ‘deceit’ when they offer reputation-building consultancy to institutions with one hand, while compiling various rankings with the other.
This insightful piece in International Higher Education by Chris Glass and Gerardo Blanco investigates the worrying dynamics of what they describe as the ‘new analytics-industrial complex’, reflecting a transition on the part of companies like THE and QS from ‘rankings to regulatory power’.
Some institutions (e.g. Utrecht University) have publicly withdrawn from global rankings. Others are signing up to initiatives such as More Than Our Rank. Meanwhile, the rankings organisations have branched out into new, more specific rankings such as the THE Impact Rankings and QS Sustainability Rankings.
The former allows institutions to differentiate themselves by selecting their ‘priority SDGs’ – but still ends up with a global ranking.
The very notion that you can reliably rank institutions that have widely differing missions and contexts (apples, oranges and - in the illustration for this blog - a pineapple) is, when you think about it, ludicrous.
That doesn’t stop rankings being used by a whole host of stakeholders to inform decisions, including:
So, are rankings still a popular KPI in international strategies? And what other measures of global reputation are used?
Posted on 19 Mar 2025 at 17:20 by Vicky Lewis
This is the ninth in my series of blogs sharing insights and emerging ideas on ways to measure international success, based on a review of university international strategies. Links to earlier blogs in the series are provided at the end of this one.
In the UK, there’s a lot of focus on having a diverse body of students. Increasing weight is also placed on nurturing a global outlook among those students.
Less attention is paid to the diversity of the staff community and the role of the institution in tapping into - and further developing - the international perspectives, expertise and networks of staff. Despite the fact that these characteristics greatly enhance and enrich delivery of the core missions of teaching and research.
There’s a clear intersection with Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) goals and sometimes ‘shared’ KPIs feature in international strategies.
Posted on 12 Mar 2025 at 16:22 by Vicky Lewis
This is the eighth in my series of blogs sharing insights and emerging ideas on ways to measure international success, based on a review of university international strategies. Links to earlier blogs in the series are provided at the end of this one.
When I’ve been involved in developing institutional strategies for global engagement, the theme of internationalised research and knowledge exchange has often been challenging to integrate.
This is partly because there’s usually a core institutional strategy for research (which may already be in existence or may still be in development) and generally a dedicated PVC / VP (Research) with ownership of this area. And – certainly for research-intensive universities – there’s an assumption that world-leading, internationally oriented and collaborative research is ‘core business’. In some institutional cultures this can lead to a slightly territorial approach, questioning the need to mention this area in an international strategy.
I try to turn this around and show that it’s an opportunity to reinforce certain research (and knowledge exchange) priorities and to shine a spotlight on those actions that make a specific contribution to building global impact.
But when there is a clear research dimension in an international strategy, how does this translate into KPIs?
Posted on 5 Mar 2025 at 09:37 by Vicky Lewis
This is the seventh in my series of blogs sharing insights and emerging ideas on ways to measure international success, based on a review of university international strategies. Links to earlier blogs in the series are provided at the end of this one.
As many people observed in the comments on my international student recruitment KPIs blog, you can’t achieve sustainable advances in attracting students to your campus without paying attention to international student experience, success and alumni engagement.
the quality of all of these feeds directly into a university’s reputation and, therefore, its ability to recruit future generations of students.
And that's not to mention the positive societal impact of nurturing a generation of well-educated, well-informed, community-minded and highly employable individuals.
The question is, how much emphasis is there in UK university international strategies on KPIs relating to these crucial priorities?
Posted on 25 Feb 2025 at 18:06 by Vicky Lewis
This is the sixth in my series of blogs sharing insights and emerging ideas on ways to measure international success, based on a review of university international strategies. Links to earlier blogs in the series are provided at the end of this one.
Following my blogs on KPIs relating to TNE and international student recruitment, this one explores success measures associated with a theme that appears to be growing in prominence in UK university international strategies: international and intercultural experiences and exposure.
It’s a bit of a mouthful but I wanted to broaden this out from ‘just’ international experiences, which may be interpreted by some as applying only to the minority of students who undertake some form of global mobility. The term ‘exposure’ embraces Internationalisation of the Curriculum and Internationalisation at Home, recognising that these have the potential to reach all students. And the term ‘intercultural’ acknowledges the beneficial impact of drawing on local experiences of cultural diversity. The frame of reference does not always need to be international.
The timing of this blog in the same week as Universities UK International’s 2025 Global Mobility conference is fortuitous. Among other things, this event explored the impact of global mobility and ways to measure this (for more takeaways, see my post-conference LinkedIn post).
Complementing this event, a highly relevant online conference is coming up in late April. The Global and Lifelong Learning team at the University of Kent is organising Innovations in Internationalisation at Home: Show us your Impact.
This consistent emphasis on impact begs the question: how do we measure success?
Posted on 19 Feb 2025 at 15:58 by Vicky Lewis
This is the fifth in my series of blogs sharing insights and emerging ideas on ways to measure international success, based on a review of university international strategies. Links to earlier blogs in the series are provided at the end of this one.
Despite a recent upsurge in the prioritisation of TNE (see blog number 4 in this series), the most common KPIs for UK institutions (at the level of both institutional strategy and supporting international strategy) have long tended to be associated with attracting international students to the UK campus. If pressed to find a single proxy for ‘international success’, many institutions would plump for ‘number of international enrolments’.
But this is a pretty blunt measure. Can we learn anything about more nuanced approaches by analysing the KPIs in recent international strategies?
Posted on 12 Feb 2025 at 16:57 by Vicky Lewis
This is the fourth in my series of blogs sharing insights and emerging ideas on ways to measure international success, based on a review of university international strategies. Links to earlier blogs in the series are provided at the end of this one.
In the second blog of this series, I noted (with plenty of caveats) that, across recent UK international strategies, the number of individual KPIs relating to ‘transnational students, programmes and partnerships’ has overtaken the number relating to ‘attracting international students to the UK campus’.
There’s an interesting parallel with current sector debates about when the number of UK transnational education (TNE) students is likely to outstrip the number of international enrolments on UK university home campuses (see UWN’s TNE numbers will overtake foreign students in UK – Experts).
The increasing emphasis on TNE is partly because it’s no longer the preserve of modern, teaching-focused institutions. When I reviewed the KPIs used in institutional strategic plans back in 2020, I noted that: ‘The only KPI category where the younger institutions clearly dominate is the one focusing on TNE, reflecting the fact that this is a strand of international activity embraced earlier as a deliberate strategy by many younger HEIs and only more recently starting to be actively pursued by some of the more traditional universities.’
It now appears to have moved firmly into the mainstream for most UK institutions. But what kinds of KPIs are used to measure success when it comes to TNE?
