Benchmarking is a formalised evaluation process by which a university can measure the standard of their policies, processes, programmes or strategies through comparison with other universities. Currently, there is a paucity of research that focuses on the documentation associated with external benchmarking undertaken by Australian universities.…

Institutional league tables, such as the Academic Ranking of World Universities, have become part of the global higher education landscape. This article discusses findings from a longitudinal study examining four Australian universities over a fifteen year period which traces how international rankings have come to be articulated in university…

Most scholarly work on internationalisation in Chinese higher education institutions has been conducted on top-level universities but prior research does not necessarily apply to regional universities that are pursuing a strategy of internationalisation and recruiting international students. This research has selected a Chinese regional university…

Many universities strive to become world-class and two of Singapore's universities are almost there, being ranked 12th and 13th in the QSWUR 2015/16. This study looked into the details of indicator rankings and found that the two universities are comparable to those in the top 10 universities in the same ranking in practically all indicators with…

In roughly a decade, university rankings gained the foreground in the policy arena for higher education and their influence is not going to decrease. However, several methodological shortcomings and warnings about the unintended consequences for national higher education systems have been raised. Against this background, this paper stresses that…

This article summarises the results of a study of the effects of quality audit at an institution over time. The findings from four academic audit reports, prepared for one New Zealand university between 1996 and 2009, yielded a large dataset. Once grouped thematically for analysis, the data were analysed in terms of how well the institution…

The starting point of this paper is the question: Which issues do students think are important when choosing a higher education institution, and how are they related to the factors taken into consideration in ranking institutions? The aim is to identify and rank the parameters students perceive as important when choosing their place of education.…

Recent research into university ranking methodologies uncovered several methodological problems among the systems currently in vogue. One of these is the discrepancy between the nominal and attained weights. The problem is the summation of unstandardized indicators for the total scores used in ranking. It is demonstrated that weight discrepancy…

University rankings are key drivers in national and institutional strategic planning. The increase in the number of university ranking systems and the diversity of methods and indicators used by these systems necessitate the development of an index that can measure a university's performance in all these systems at once. This article presents…

Despite being one of the major reasons for the development of quality assessment, students seem relatively unaware of its potential impact. Since one of the main purposes of assessment is to provide students with information on the quality of universities, this lack of awareness brings in to question the effectiveness of assessment as a device for…

Enterprise risk management strategies were used to develop a regulatory and operational framework for a new multi-partner Research Institute that will house up to 900 staff from four different institutions in Queensland, Australia. The Institute will operate in a business environment while functioning as a research resource for the higher…

Discrepancies between the nominal and attained indicator weights misinform rank consumers as to the relative importance of the indicators. This may lead to unwarranted institutional judgements and misdirected actions, causing resources being wasted unnecessarily. As a follow-up to two earlier studies, data from the Academic Ranking of World…

Through an exploratory case study of four Australian universities this article finds that foreign market entry strategies are shaped by prestige-seeking motivations and a culture of risk aversion. From the market selection, entry mode and higher education literature, a conceptual model, embedded with four propositions, is presented. The model sees…

In recent years, UK universities have become increasingly concerned with performance management. This trend reflects both growing competition and marketisation within higher education, and the increasing requirements for accountability. In response, institutions have begun to explore the application of formal methodologies for performance…

This paper evaluates the performance of national higher education systems in 48 countries as measured with 20 variables grouped under the four headings of Resources, Environment, Connectivity and Output. Rankings within each module are then combined into an overall ranking that is topped by the United States followed by Sweden, Canada, Finland and…