International Strategy for Higher Education Institutions
Posted on by Vicky Lewis
When I reviewed UK universities’ strategic plans during the pandemic, I found that they tended to use a narrow, fairly inward-looking set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure their international success. This was despite the fact that the rhetoric in the strategy documents often emphasised bold, outward-facing ambitions about making a positive global contribution.
Across the higher education sector, many saw the pandemic as an opportunity to step back and consider what ‘globally engaged’ or ‘internationally active’ might mean for universities when these concepts are not predicated on physical mobility. Commitments were made to maintain a broader perspective on internationalisation and global engagement post-pandemic – and to ‘build back better’.
It struck me that one way of evaluating whether universities were sticking to these commitments would be to examine institutional KPIs in this area. After all, KPIs tend to determine where an institution focuses its resources and efforts. In practice, they count for more than any noble words in the narrative of strategy documents.
So, during 2024, using the lens of international KPIs, I explored whether there have been any noticeable changes in the international success measures that UK universities deploy at institutional strategy level.
The quick answer is ‘not really’. The only clear shift has been in KPIs relating to environmental sustainability, which have become much more central in post-pandemic strategic plans. Beyond that, the distribution of international KPIs is broadly similar to that in pre-pandemic strategies, with the most frequently occurring KPI relating to the number or proportion of on-campus international students.
This is probably not surprising. UK universities have been under severe financial pressures and international student fee income has been one of the only levers they could use to help balance the books. It may also be unrealistic to expect KPIs at the institutional strategy level (the tip of the iceberg) to be anything other than fairly blunt or simplistic measures.
In a search for more imaginative and varied measures of success, I decided to look below the surface and investigate the KPIs used at the next level down in the strategy hierarchy: UK university international and global engagement strategies.
Only a minority of UK universities publish their international strategy, and even fewer include KPIs within the published version, so it was not really possible to draw a comparison between pre- and post-pandemic KPIs. However, across the fourteen international strategies with KPIs that I was able to review during my two rounds of analysis in 2020 and 2024, there was nonetheless some useful intelligence to share with the sector.
The strategies exhibited a range of different approaches and, in amongst the predictable KPIs, included some interesting new angles on measuring success. So, over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing some insights and emerging ideas via a new series of blogs (of which this is the first) on UK universities’ international KPIs.
|