How internationalised is your university? How can you know and what can you do?

In January 2016, Times Higher Education (THE) published its latest rankings of the world’s “most international universities”. The results are based on their “international outlook indicator”, which takes into account each institution’s proportion of international staff, proportion of international students and proportion of research papers published with at least one co-author from another country. A number of comments have been posted on the THE website, many of which are critical of the methodology used to calculate the rankings. Some point to the impact of size of country and others question whether academics from neighbouring countries/regions (e.g. Germans in Austria; Mainland Chinese in Hong Kong) really make the university more international. Yet others question whether the findings necessarily correlate with ‘bestness’, yet Phil Baty, the editor of the THE World University Rankings, maintains that while they are not a proxy for excellence, they help people gain a deeper understanding of the global higher education landscape