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Rules of engagement: measuring connectivity in national systems of higher education

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Abstract

With the advent of mass higher education and the consequent absorption of significant national resources, both public and private, it is inevitable that universities are increasingly expected to meet a range of societal needs. They are expected to ‘connect’ with society at large. In this paper, we argue that connectivity is best integrated with research, teaching and scholarship and should not be relegated to a ‘third stream’. We compare degrees of connectivity of 50 national systems of higher education using ten indicators, making a distinction between domestic and international connectivity. The strongest finding is that smaller countries exhibit the highest level of international connectivity. The higher education systems in countries with large absolute numbers of researchers such as the USA, China and Japan are relatively self-contained compared with countries such as Ireland, Switzerland and Singapore. Another finding is the relative insularity of the education sector in Eastern Europe, including the Russian Federation. When differences in levels of economic development are allowed for, among lower-income countries South Africa stands out as having a well-connected higher education sector.

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Notes

  1. The Times Higher Ed ranking does include internationalisation and links to industry measures, with a combined weight of ten per cent. Internationalisation is measured by the percentages of international students and staff. Delgado-Márquez et al. (2013) use the Times data to show that the degree of internationalisation exerts a positive influence on a university’s reputation.

  2. As an interesting example of media engagement, Smith (2013) documents the linkages between academics and the BBC in post-war Britain.

  3. The World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) acts as an international patents office and, under the Patent Co-operation Treaty, provides a written report to applicants, which facilitates the awarding of national patents. For this reason WIPO does not have data on patents awarded; nevertheless, because of the cost and time involved, application to WIPO implies that the invention is important.

  4. In aggregating data missing values have been dealt with as follows. International students: values for Argentina and Mexico put equal to the percentage figure for Chile; India given the figure for Indonesia. Outbound enrolment: Singapore and Taiwan-China put at third-quartile value. IMD knowledge transfer: Iran, Saudi Arabia and Serbia given first quartile number. WEF Forum survey: Taiwan-China estimated from rank in IMD survey. Taking slightly different values as placeholders does not alter the overall score significantly.

  5. Williams and de Rassenfosse (2014) provide a detailed discussion of the methodologies for aggregating performance measures into a ranking in the specific context of the higher education literature.

  6. In order to capture the non-linearity in UIC we fitted the quadratic to countries with GDP per capita over $16,000 and for countries below that level we used their average UIC score as the predicted value.

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Acknowledgments

Gaétan de Rassenfosse’s current affiliation is College of Management, Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland. The article was written when Gaétan was a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne. This work forms part of the Universitas 21 sponsored project Ranking National Systems of Higher Education located at the Melbourne Institute, University of Melbourne (www.universitas21.com). We are indebted to Robert Tijssen (CWTS-Leiden) and Isidro Aguillo (Webometrics) for the provision of data. We are most grateful to the Editor and two anonymous referees who provided very insightful comments on an earlier draft.

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  1. Melbourne Institute, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, 3010, Australia

    Gaétan de Rassenfosse & Ross Williams

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  1. Gaétan de Rassenfosse
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Correspondence to Ross Williams.

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de Rassenfosse, G., Williams, R. Rules of engagement: measuring connectivity in national systems of higher education. High Educ 70, 941–956 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-015-9881-y

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