Underneath is the 121^st issue of the VU International News and Reviews.

The purpose of this digital publication is to identify relevant data-driven reports on any aspect of the international dimension of higher education and research. It gives a brief description of the reports, with a hyperlink to where it can be found.

The VU International News and Reviews is made with specific attention for the perspective of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and its partners in the Aurora network of societally engaged research universities.

But subscription is open and free for anyone interested in the topics covered – subscribers are free to forward the VU International News and Reviews to interested colleagues, who can subscribe by mailing to kees.kouwenaar@vu.nl. .

Regular subscribers can get direct access to the available reports in the Newsletter Dropbox folder.

To give an impression of the readers of the biweekly electronic magazine, I give an overview of those subscribed. On average, each issue of the VU IN&R is opened by more than 35% of the subscribers.

Recruitment, Graduate, America

The Council of Graduate Schools in the US has published its “Graduate Enrollment and Degrees: 2007 – 2017”, reporting an overall decrease in Master’s and Doctoral admission, with research universities suffering the least. First-time graduate enrollment of international students decreased (-3.7%) between Fall 2016 and Fall 2017. The last time there was a decrease was in 2003 – probably related to 9/11. Again, highly selective research universities are least affected, but the second and lower tiers suffer all the more. Engineering has suffered particularly badly with an overall decrease of 7,3% between Fall 2016 and Fall 2017. The report stressed that the long term data still show strong increase between 2007 – 2017, underlining the hopes that the 2016-176 decrease is a temporary dip and not the reversal of a trend. The report shows that the proportion of international graduates students – and thus institutional vulnerability – varies greatly, with Engineering, Math/CompSci and Business having the biggest percentiles of internationals.

Education, Management, Capacity development

The Boston College Center for International Higher Education published a report Higher Education Management Training schemes in the Field of Development Cooperation.

While it provides a useful overview and description of the various programmes - funded by various donors – which aim to assistant managers, administrators and leaders of universities in developing countries to improve the way they do their jobs, the report has to acknowledge limited results on their crucial 3^rd research question: one question on the impact and effectiveness of these programmes. Most programmes don’t cater for post-intervention assessment of change. Where Nuffic is one of the few managers of such programmes that does some kind of post programme assessment, also Nuffic – I happen to know – has no mechanism to compare “before intervention” with “after intervention” data; let alone “with intervention” and “without intervention”. Part of the mixed and reduced societal credit of capacity development programmes is due to this extreme weakness in demonstrating effectiveness and the report would have been stronger if it had pointed that out more clearly – contractors allowing, of course.

Education, Diversity, America

The Race and Equity Center of the University of Southern California has published an analysis on how public HE institutions in the US are doing in equity for Black undergraduate students. In the report Black Students at Public Colleges and Universities they looked at overall representational equity, gender equity, completion equity and Black-student-to-Black-staff ration. They found Blacks constitute 14,6% of the age group but only 9,8% of undergraduates and that completion rates for Blacks is considerably lower than for all undergraduates: 39,4% ßà 50,6%. For every Black faculty member there are 42 students and 40 HE institutions in the report have no full time Black instructors at all. Gender equity among black students is fairly balanced. The report scores institutions and states according to the standard academic scoring in the US, from A to F with a numerical translation from 4 to 0. The country average is 2,02, or a weak C.

Unfortunately, there are no historical data in the report: we can’t see which states are closing the gap and where it is even widening.

Altmetrics, Assessment, Research

Juan Pablo Alperin from Simon Fraser University in Canada has led a research on How significant are the public dimensions of faculty work in review, promotion, and tenure documents?. Analysing review, tenure and promotion documents from a representative sample of 129 Canadian and American universities, they did find terms and concepts related to public and community are mentioned in a large portion of documents, but mostly in ways that relate to service—an undervalued aspect of academic careers. They did, however, find significant mentions of traditional research outputs and citation-based metrics which reward faculty work targeted to academics, and mostly disregard the public dimensions. They conclude that institutions that want to live up to their public mission need to work towards systemic change in how faculty work is assessed and incentivized.

Research, Impact, Europe

Last May, the European Commission published the report “Spreading Excellence & Widening Participation in Horizon 2020”. The report shows that although participation in H2020 from countries in e.g. the Baltic and Eastern and South-eastern Europe has somewhat improved, it is still significantly lower than from traditionally successful countries in H2020. Some of these EU-13 countries, like Cyprus, Estonia and Slovenia actually now do better than the overall average of the so-called EU-15 countries. But this means that other weaker countries are actually lagging behind even further.

Research, Impact, Netherlands

The OECD has published the report of its assessment on “Supporting Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Higher Education in the Netherlands”. The 162 pages report was the result of the HEInnovate review of the Netherlands, conducted by the OECD together with the European Commission.

Overall, the report is fairly positive about the Netherlands and what they call “valorisation”. Many HE institutions are offering a rich variety of entrepreneurship education activities. Valorisation takes many forms and efforts are made to have a common set of indicators on how it creates societal and economic impact (and how much). Of course, recommendations for further improvements are being offered.

It was based on selected case studies, a background report and kick-off workshop, a number of site visits and a leadership survey – ending with a draft report and final workshop. For a qualitative approach a fairly robust approach, particularly because it is used for all HEInnovate country studies and provides a basis for comparative analysis.

Education, Selection, Europe

Researchers from the Amsterdam Center for Learning Analytics (ACLA) have published a study on “The Consequences of Academic Dismissal on Academic Success”. ACLA has a non/profit set-up and was founded by researchers from the Vrije Universiteit. The study has analysed the impact of the “Binding Study Advice” that allows Dutch universities to dismiss students who fail to acquire the set minimum proportion of first year’s study points (often 45 out of 60 for a full year). Contrary to earlier studies, the researchers looked where the dismissed students went – to similar programmes elsewhere or to other programmes within their university. It concludes that there are no significant differences in study success between students who just made the minimum threshold (escaping the dismissal) and those who just failed – and had to leave. The latter choose the same programme elsewhere (43,4%) or a similar programme in the same university 41,9%). After that switch, they show similar retention rates and time to degree as those who escaped dismissal. Consequently, they conclude that the “Binding Study Advice” adds no effectiveness to the Dutch HE system, except maybe by inducing the dismissed students to extra an effort.

Research, Ranking, Aurora

The 2019 version of the Times Higher Ranking is out. Some things change and some things stay the same. What stays the same is the huge impact of “reputation” on the rankings and the unclarity of the methodology used. What also stays the same is very funny outliers like the Babol Noshirvani University of Technology being the absolute world leader in field weighted citations. Based on what tricks is a question that no doubt is researched now by many across the world.

Some changes in detailed placings – let us underline that these are usually statistically irrelevant but nonetheless scrutinized in board rooms.

Across the Board, Aurora universities don’t do badly in terms of their field weighted citations scores. Most see a slight improvement in their absolute scores, but also in how they compare to other domestic research universities: moving up a bit (or more than a bit: East Anglia and Aberdeen) or being stable. The University of Iceland might want to have a look at their slight dip in citation scores which seems to be more than such a one year’s incident.

Let’s compare the reputation based overall Times Higher Ranking with the “rank in country” based on citation metrics only:

              Reputation            Citation rank

                 rank                        rank

UDE             23                           5
UGA             10                           7
UAberdeen    22                         14
UAntwerp       4                           5
UiB                2                           1
UEA              29                          9
UGothenburg  7                           2
UI                  1                           1
VUA              10                          6

All Aurora universities have a domestic reputation gap, except Iceland and Antwerp!

At this year’s EAIE conference, a lot of attention was given to the EAIE values that have been articulated over de past years and are now celebrated – at the conference and in other places. The EAIE values: Collaborative, Inspiring, Inclusive, Excellent – are indeed wonderful and important things. But they made me think a bit about how values as are to work in daily life:

1. Are your organisational values the things that as an organisation you’ll always explain that you are already doing: “look how collaborative, inspiring, inclusive, excellent we are”?
2. Are they the mirrors to keep you well aware that there is always room for improvement: “We say (and believe) we are collaborative, inspiring, inclusive, excellent, but let’s keep checking if we are always living up to our own expectations”.
3. Or are your organisational values your aspirations, your beacons in the distance: “We know we’re not nearly as collaborative, inspiring, inclusive or excellent as we want to be. That is why we call these are values, because they set our goals of what we want to become.”

I am a devoted EAIE member – and have been since its foundation in 1989. I hope and I want to believe that our EAIE values are a combination of option 2 and 3, rather than an expression of option 1.