What Happens When You Benchmark Internationalization?

A quick test. How many of these can you answer right now, without sending a single email?

• Is internationalization explicitly included in your institution's strategic plan?
• Who specifically exercises authority over budgets and decision-making for each of these areas: international partnerships, research, and enrollment?
• How many international inquiries has your institution received over the past three academic years, and which tool(s) are you using to track them?
• How do you select your global recruitment markets?
• How many students are participating in your study abroad programs and how many in COIL? How many of your faculty use COIL?
• Are you performing as well and as efficiently as your peer institutions in any of these areas?
  

That last question is the real kicker.

Most SIOs can answer some of these immediately. Others will need to tap knowledge from offices across campus and find at least one spreadsheet nobody has opened since spring. We wonder how your president and business office team would fare with those questions. And back to that last question...very few, if any, have the answer to that one.

These questions are a sample of what's being asked in the AIEA-Intead study Examining Success Factors in Internationalization, now underway.

This research is about understanding what the investment in internationalization (and the org chart that investment supports) produces. And importantly, how that investment and those outcomes compare across 100 U.S. institutions. There is real power in the findings we will report.

During an Intead webinar held recently, Dr. Cheryl Young, Associate Vice President of Global Initiatives and SIO at Miami University, and Dr. Gian Mario Besana, Associate Provost for Global Engagement and Online Learning at DePaul University, both research participants, recently spoke about their experiences with the study so far. One unexpected benefit they both cited: simply working through the study's questions is prompting conversations across their campuses that weren't happening before.

Full disclosure, early cross-campus collaboration wasn’t the primary driver for the research study, but we’re thrilled to hear it is happening so quickly.

Listen to the full conversation from our webinar, which includes our colleagues from Miami University and DePaul along with Clare Overmann of AIEA, industry veteran Brad Farnsworth, and me, to get first-hand insight into why these two institutions joined the study and what they’re finding so far.

Read on…

You Can't Benchmark What You Haven't Brought Together 

The point of benchmarking isn't to find out who has the biggest international office. It's to move from Are we growing or declining? to a more useful question: Compared to what? Compared to whom? 

If two similar institutions make very different investments, is that a strategic choice or a gap? That delta is where strategy actually starts. 

In the conversation, Dr. Young described how being involved in our research process prompted the realization that Miami University had never before brought this breadth of internationalization information together in one place.  

For Dr. Besana, that same collaborative effort surfaced something more specific: as institutions increasingly find themselves defending budgets and resources, he pointed to the value of external benchmarking as a "second narrative" for those conversations — one that doesn't rely solely on his own advocacy. 

Our study looks across four areas that are specifically measurable and comparable across institutions:

• strategy
• international enrollment
• study abroad

• international partnerships
  

These areas combine quantitative and qualitative data on resources (staffing), activities, outcomes, and the enrollment funnel. The final report will provide clarity on your current state and give you peer-to-peer comparative data.  

Participating institutions will eventually have access to something no single institution can build on its own: a common dataset showing how US colleges and universities are actually approaching internationalization, the investments, and outcomes. Understanding which department heads report up to which university leadership with what kind of authority will be valuable in and of itself. Knowing how investments in specific initiatives produce quantified results 

Will similar institutions turn out to be making very different investments? Will certain approaches show up more often among institutions reporting stronger outcomes? For the first time, internationalization leaders will be able to see how their own structure and investment decisions compare to the broader field - and then ask what actually matters: What are peer institutions doing differently? Are current investments producing the outcomes we want? What should change?

The benchmark study results will justify decisions by pointing out where your institution is leading the pack or lagging behind.

Join the Study 

Our research effort is built differently than the ACE Internationalization Lab which was a self-study without comparative data.

A couple of important differentiators that we think you will value about our study:

• It's highly data-driven coupled with narrative
• It’s built to be faster and a lighter lift – we provide the researchers to collect and analyze the data without forming committees

We are thrilled to have Brad Farnsworth as our lead researcher, who spent years guiding    scores of institutions through the ACE internationalization lab.

Be in touch for more details on what participation will look like for your institution or listen to the full webinar to hear directly from Dr. Young and Dr. Besana about what they're finding so far. We hope to hear from you!