BENCHMARKING AT INTERNATIONAL OFFICES 1 Technical ...

Running head: BENCHMARKING AT INTERNATIONAL OFFICES

Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau Faculty of Business, Computing and Law Study programme: European Management

Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts

A Benchmarking Study of Service Levels at International Offices within the Framework of the Erasmus+ Programme

Submitted:

25 September 2014

Registration number:

51/2014

Author:

Simon Gerard Joseph Devos

Place and date of birth:

Ypres (Kingdom of Belgium), 20 August 1991

Matriculation number:

127911610

First supervisor:

Prof. Dr. disc. pol. Marco Althaus

Second supervisor:

Prof. Dr. phil. Bertil Haack

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BENCHMARKING AT INTERNATIONAL OFFICES

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Acknowledgements Two and a half years ago, I was the first Belgian student at TH Wildau. At the time, I had only planned to stay for one semester. At the time, I had never thought about getting a Masters’ degree and working at the international office of a German university. It is a long lane that has no turning... The idea of this thesis did not come to my mind on a blue Monday. It has been maturing since December 2012, the moment I started working at the international office of TH Wildau. At the international office, I have had the privilege to work together with probably the best colleagues in the world. Frau Dr. Schubert, Carolina, Daniela, Silvana, Hendrik and Johannes: thank you. You’ve taught me so many things. You’re more than just colleagues. This thesis is written for you, my German and international friends. From Saint Petersburg to Barcelona, from Medellin to Gdansk: you are my source of motivation (and drinks on Friday evenings). Dear colleagues at international offices all across Europe and consultants in both benchmarking and international education, thank you for your feedback. Without your efforts, this thesis could neither have been relevant, nor substantial. Dear Prof. Dr. Althaus, thank you for advising me on my thesis. You’re the only professor I had lectures with during every semester of my studies in Wildau. I am proud that you wanted to advice me on my thesis. Your skills and expertise inspire and motivate me to one day become a professor myself. Maman and dad, I know it has not been easy for you to see me studying one thousand kilometres away from home, but I am incredibly grateful that you have always supported me in what I do. Over the last 23 years, you’ve taught me to change the world bit by bit. That’s also


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what I’ve been trying to do with this thesis. Emma, my little sister, you are a great person full of bright ideas. I am proud to be your brother. Auntie Nadine, thank you for your support and wise advice. Your influence on me cannot be underestimated. All of you: I am incredibly proud to be surrounded by such a warm and wise family. Even though it might not be visible to the outside world, this thesis has a high symbolic meaning to me. Exactly one hundred years after the First World War divided our continent, a modest student from Ypres went to Germany and was given the chance to initiate a study which brought European nations and people a tiny little bit closer together via improving student exchanges through exchanging practices of international offices.

Without the European Union, this entire journey would not have been possible.

Uniting is a verb. Let us continue conjugating it.

Simon


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A Benchmarking Study of Service Levels at International Offices within the Framework of the Erasmus+ Programme

Ein Benchmarking-Studie von Service Levels Akademischer Auslandsämter im Rahmen des Erasmus+ Programms

Une Étude Comparative des Services proposés par les Bureaux des Relations Internationales Relatifs au Programme Erasmus+

Het Benchmarken van Serviceniveaus van International Offices Binnen het Kader van het Erasmus+ Programma


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Abstract (English) The aim of this thesis is to develop a benchmarking model to compare and improve service levels of international offices within the framework of the Erasmus+ project and to carry out a benchmarking study based on this benchmarking model. In the first part, literature is reviewed so that the benchmarking model fulfils the latest academic findings on the topic of this thesis. Here, we identify a tendency towards collaborative benchmarking. Collaborative benchmarking is reported to be the most appropriate way to benchmark in higher education contexts. However, so far, all accessible benchmarking studies at international offices have clear shortcomings. In the second part of this work, a methodology to benchmark service levels of international offices is sketched. Here, both the stages of the benchmarking process and the tools used during the benchmarking process are described in detail. Feedback from different universities is implemented so that the robustness of the methodology is assured. Then, a benchmarking study is carried out in practice, based on the methodology described in this work, at TH Wildau and Vives South University College. In conclusion, this thesis argues that collaborative benchmarking is a good way of quality management at international offices, although it should be done from a student perspective: benchmarking activities of international offices that are directly linked to the needs of the incoming exchange students makes it possible to identify and exchange good practices between universities even though the international offices have different organisational structures and responsibilities. The benchmarking model developed in this thesis proves to be effective in practice.


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Abstract (German) Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, ein Benchmarking-Modell zu entwickeln, um ServiceLevels von akademischen Auslandsämtern im Rahmen des Erasmus+ -Projektes zu vergleichen und zu verbessern und eine Benchmarking-Studie auf der Grundlage dieses BenchmarkingModells durchzuführen. Im ersten Teil wird die Literatur überprüft, so dass das Benchmarking-Modell die neuesten wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisse zum Thema erfüllt. Hier identifizieren wir eine Tendenz zum kollaborativen Benchmarking. Es wird festgestellt, dass dies der am besten geeignete Weg ist um an Hochschulen zu benchmarken. Bis jetzt haben alle BenchmarkingStudien für akademische Auslandsämter jedoch Unzulänglichkeiten. Im zweiten Teil dieser Arbeit wird eine Methodik für das Benchmarking von ServiceLevels akademischer Auslandsämter skizziert. Hier werden sowohl die Phasen als auch die Werkzeuge, die im Benchmarking-Prozess verwendet werden, im Detail beschrieben. Rückmeldungen von verschiedenen Universitäten werden genutzt, so dass die Stärken des Modells aufgezeigt werden. Danach wird eine Benchmarking-Studie in der Praxis an der TH Wildau und Vives South University College durchgeführt, auf der Grundlage der in dieser Arbeit beschriebenen Methodik. In dieser Arbeit wird argumentiert, dass kooperatives Benchmarking ein guter Weg für Qualitätsmanagement bei akademischen Auslandsämtern ist, obwohl man es von der Studierenden-Perspektive sehen muss: Benchmarking-Aktivitäten der akademischen Auslandsämter, die direkt auf die Bedürfnisse der Austauschstudierenden ausgerichtet sind, machen es möglich, gute Praktiken zwischen Universitäten zu identifizieren und auszutauschen, obwohl die akademischen Auslandsämter unterschiedliche Organisationsstrukturen und

BENCHMARKING AT INTERNATIONAL OFFICES Verantwortlichkeiten haben. Das Benchmarking-Modell, welches in dieser Arbeit entwickelt worden ist, bewährt sich in der Praxis.

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Table of Contents Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... 2 Abstract (English) ........................................................................................................................... 5 Abstract (German) .......................................................................................................................... 6 Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ 8 List of Tables ................................................................................................................................ 11 List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... 13 List of Abbreviations .................................................................................................................... 14 Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 15 Background ............................................................................................................................... 15 Statement of the problem .......................................................................................................... 16 Purpose of the study .................................................................................................................. 18 Research questions .................................................................................................................... 19 Significance to the field ............................................................................................................ 20 Definitions................................................................................................................................. 21 International office. ............................................................................................................... 21 Exchange student. ................................................................................................................. 22 Limitations ................................................................................................................................ 22 Literature review ........................................................................................................................... 24 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 24 ERASMUS (+) .......................................................................................................................... 26 Introduction. .......................................................................................................................... 26 Regulation (EU) 1288/2013. ................................................................................................. 27 Erasmus+ programme guide. ................................................................................................ 28 ERASMUS Charter for Higher Education 2014-2020. ........................................................ 29 Conclusion. ........................................................................................................................... 30 Priorities of exchange students ................................................................................................. 31 Introduction. .......................................................................................................................... 31


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Need for advice and assistance of foreign students at TH Wildau. ...................................... 32 Conclusion. ........................................................................................................................... 39 Benchmarking in higher education ........................................................................................... 40 Introduction. .......................................................................................................................... 40 Benchmarking in higher education. ...................................................................................... 41 Benchmarking in the Improvement of Higher Education. .................................................... 45 Benchmarking in European higher education. ...................................................................... 48 Conclusion. ........................................................................................................................... 56 Benchmarking at international offices ...................................................................................... 57 Introduction. .......................................................................................................................... 57 AUDIF Benchmarking 2011. ................................................................................................ 58 Internationalization in higher education. Results of a German-Austrian benchmarking project. .................................................................................................................................. 59 Benchmarking the provision of services for international students in further education institutions. ............................................................................................................................ 63 Conclusion. ........................................................................................................................... 65 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 66 Benchmarking Service Levels of International Offices ................................................................ 69 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 69 Methodology ............................................................................................................................. 69 The benchmarking model ......................................................................................................... 71 Introduction. .......................................................................................................................... 71 Needs and tasks. .................................................................................................................... 71 KPIs....................................................................................................................................... 75 Good practices. ..................................................................................................................... 77 Balanced scorecard. .............................................................................................................. 80 Scoring key. .......................................................................................................................... 80 Feedback of different universities. ........................................................................................ 86 Introduction. ...................................................................................................................... 86 Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau, Germany. ......................................... 87 Ruhr West University of Applied Sciences, Germany. .................................................... 87


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Saint Etienne University Institute of Technology, France. ............................................... 89 Vives South University College, Belgium. ....................................................................... 90 Conclusion. ....................................................................................................................... 91 Priorities of students. ............................................................................................................ 91 Conclusion. ........................................................................................................................... 94 Implementation of the model .................................................................................................... 95 Introduction. .......................................................................................................................... 95 Participants. ........................................................................................................................... 96 Data gathering and reporting. ............................................................................................... 96 Introduction. ...................................................................................................................... 96 Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau, Germany. ......................................... 97 Vives South University College, Belgium. ..................................................................... 106 Overview. ........................................................................................................................ 113 Action plan to introduce change. ........................................................................................ 114 Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau, Germany. ....................................... 114 Vives South University College, Belgium. ..................................................................... 119 Monitoring and follow-up. .................................................................................................. 119 Conclusion. ......................................................................................................................... 120 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 121 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 123 References ................................................................................................................................... 124 Annex .......................................................................................................................................... 127 Declaration .................................................................................................................................. 128


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List of Tables Table 1 Difficult aspects of preparing the study visit to Germany, according to national origin (in per cent) (Gesellschaft für Empirische Studien bR, 2014, p. 15) ........................... 33! Table 2 Difficult aspects of preparing the study visit to Germany, according to type of university and university clusters (in per cent) (Gesellschaft für Empirische Studien bR, 2014, p. 16) ................................................................................................................................. 33! Table 3 Difficulties upon arrival in Germany, according to natioinal origin (in per cent) (Gesellschaft für Empirische Studien bR, 2014, p. 17) ................................................ 34! Table 4 Difficulties upon arrival in Germany, according to type of university and university clusters (in per cent) (Gesellschaft für Empirische Studien bR, 2014, p. 17) .............. 34! Table 5 Claimed service offer at the university for foreign students according to type of university and university clusters (in per cent, multiple mentions allowed) (Gesellschaft für Empirische Studien bR, 2014, p. 27) ................................................ 36! Table 6 Wish for more or different service offers at the university for foreign students according to type of university and university clusters (in per cent, multiple mentions allowed) (Gesellschaft für Empirische Studien bR, 2014, p. 31) ................................................ 37! Table 7 Balanced scorecard (own creation) ................................................................................. 80! Table 8 Scoring key for the internal formalities (own creation) ................................................. 82! Table 9 Scoring key for the external formalities (own creation) .................................................. 83! Table 10 Scoring key for housing (own creation) ......................................................................... 83! Table 11 Scoring key for integration (own creation).................................................................... 84! Table 12 Scoring key for general services (own creation) ........................................................... 84! Table 13 Scoring key for the budget (own creation)..................................................................... 85! Table 14 Possible outcomes when dividing scores through priorities (own creation) ................. 94! Table 15 Timeliness of the completion of internal formalities at TH Wildau (own creation) .... 101! Table 16 Correctness of the completion of internal formalities at TH Wildau (own creation) .. 102! Table 17 Fluency of the completion of internal formalities at TH Wildau (own creation) ........ 103! Table 18 Assistance offer for external formalities at TH Wildau (own creation) ...................... 103! Table 19 Fluency of the completion of external formalities at TH Wildau (own creation) ........ 104! Table 20 Housing at TH Wildau (own creation) ........................................................................ 104! Table 21 Offer of integration-supporting activities at TH Wildau (own creation)..................... 105!


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Table 22 Price of integration-supporting activities at TH Wildau (own creation) .................... 105! Table 23 General services of the international office of TH Wildau (own creation) ................. 105! Table 24 Budget of the international office of TH Wildau (own creation) ................................. 106! Table 25 Overview of the performance of the international office of TH Wildau (own creation) ............................................................................................................ 106! Table 26 Timeliness of the completion of internal formalities at Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014)) .................................................................... 107! Table 27 Correctness of the completion of internal formalities at Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014)) .................................................................... 108! Table 28 Fluency of the completion of internal formalities at Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014)) .................................................................... 109! Table 29 Assistance offer for external formalities at Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014)) .................................................................... 109! Table 30 Fluency of the completion of external formalities at Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014)) .................................................................... 110! Table 31 Housing at Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014)) .................................................................... 110! Table 32 Offer of integration-supporting activities at Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014)) ......................................................................................................................... 111! Table 33 Price of integration-supporting activities at Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014)) .................................................................... 111! Table 34 General services of the international office of Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014)) .................................................................... 112! Table 35 Budget of the international office of Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014)) .................................................................... 112! Table 36 Overview of the performance of the international office of Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014)) .................................................................... 112! Table 37 Comparison of the benchmarking scores of TH Wildau and Vives (own creation) .... 113!


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List of Figures Figure 1 Structure of the literature review of this thesis (own creation) .................................... 24! Figure 2 Benchmarking space (Hämäläinen, 2003, p. 9) ........................................................... 46! Figure 3 Overview of the stages and steps of a typical collaborative university benchmarking process (van Vught et al., 2010, p. 70) ......................................................................... 52! Figure 4 Our benchmarking methodology (based on van Vught et al., 2010, p. 70) .................. 70!


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List of Abbreviations AUDIF

Australian Universities Directors’ Forum

DAAD

Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service)

ECHE

Erasmus Charter for Higher Education

ENQA

European Network for Quality Assurance in Higher Education

ERASMUS

European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students

Erasmus+

EU programme 2014-2020 for Education, Training, Youth and Sport

ESMU

European Centre for Strategic Management of Universities

EU

European Union

HIS

Hochschul-Informations-System eG (Higher Education Information System)

IUT

Institut Universitaire de Technologie (University Institute of Technology)

KPI

Key Performance Indicator

OECD

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

TH Wildau

Technische Hochschule Wildau (Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau)

UKCISA

United Kingdom Council for International Student Affairs

UNESCO

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

Vives

Vives South University College


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Introduction Background Over the last 20 years, the number of students studying outside their home countries has skyrocketed. Where in 1990 about 1.3 million students were studying abroad, this number had risen to over 4.3 million in 2011 (OECD, 2013, p. 1). However, even though the number of students has risen, several hurdles for students going abroad have remained in place. Administrative formalities, mutual recognition of academic degrees, language barriers and culture shocks still sound familiar to those studying abroad. In the European Union, the ERASMUS project was set up in 1987 and gave the chance to in total almost 3 million European students to study at a foreign university (European Commission, 2014a). In January 2014, the Erasmus+ programme was launched by the European Commission to replace the old ERASMUS programme. With a budget of 14.7 billion EUR (40 per cent more than before), more than 2 million students enrolled in higher education will get the opportunity to study abroad within the upcoming seven years (European Commission, 2014d). In times of budgetary difficulties, this budget rise shows the importance of mobility of students for the EU. Just like the international trend, the number of students going abroad within the ERASMUS framework has risen sharply from 3,244 in 1987 to 252,827 in 2011 (European Commission, 2013). One reason for the success of the programme is the harmonisation of the European higher education system (the Bologna-process), which makes the recognition of degrees easier inside the EU. Although the amount of administrative formalities needed to go on ERASMUS is limited, some paperwork, however, remains necessary. Moreover, language barriers do still exist and culture shocks are still faced by students studying abroad.


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Internationalisation has become an important part of universities’ strategies to improve their reputation. Consequently, at most universities an international office has been created and charged with helping foreign students to come and study at the university. Via support for the students, international offices try to overcome the above-mentioned barriers in concrete cases. Although it is likely that the employees at international offices do their best to deliver excellent services, it is not sure that, keeping in mind the available budget, the needs of the international students are attended in the best possible way. In times of crisis, the call for thinking about how to spend government money becomes more significant. All over Europe, governments are cutting costs and efficiency is becoming a key term in public service. In order to become more efficient, we have seen several public institutions introducing management approaches that were originally developed to be used by companies. The same trend can be seen at universities: with support from the European Commission, the European Centre for Strategic Management of Universities (ESMU) initiated a project on benchmarking - a quality management tool widely used in business environments - in higher education from 2008 till 2011, which resulted in a handbook and a practical guide on benchmarking in European higher education (van Vught et al., 2010). Statement of the problem In order to justify the Erasmus+ budget raise, it is crucial that positive outcomes of the project are guaranteed and the available money is spent in a wise and efficient way. It is therefore wise to think about efficiency and quality management at international offices of universities. Generally spoken, the methodologies which are currently used for managing quality at international offices can be separated in two categories: models based on golden standards


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(e.g. the ERASMUS Charter for Higher Education, the National Code of Conduct for German Universities Regarding International Students, …) and models and/or surveys organised by one single university. The main issue with these quality management methodologies is that they do not give the international offices the chance to exchange good practices, although universities are seen as excellent places to manage quality by exchanging good practices (Schofield, 1998a, p. 5). Moreover, due to the fact that the amount of international experience differs from university to university, high return on investment is possible as universities with more experience can exchange well-established practices for bright ideas of universities with less international experience. Here, benchmarking can be a solution to improve this exchange. When thinking about implementing benchmarking at international offices, however, certain issues arise. First of all, when going through the available literature on benchmarking at international offices, we see that most benchmarking tools have only compared service levels of international offices of universities within one single country. It is, however, clear that universities do not only compete with universities from the same country. Students usually have the opportunity to study at different universities in different countries. Generally spoken, we could thus say that the market for international education is international. One of the most influential management accounting theories at present is the beyond budgeting-theory of Jeremy Hope and Robin Fraser. This theory says that companies should not compare their achievements with their previous achievements, but with the trends on the market (Hope & Fraser, 2013, pp. 147-149). We should thus compare the service levels of international offices internationally. At the same time, due to the fact that certain needs of exchange students (e.g. housing, issue of the Transcript of Records, …) are similar across countries, services


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offered and good practices developed by the international office of the host university can be compared internationally. As stated before, the most important objectives of implementing benchmarking at international offices are to match the expectations of the students in the best possible way and to identify efficiency wins by comparing processes across international offices. It is crucial to spend the available budget for offering services at foreign students in the most efficient way. We must therefore define the priorities of exchange students and take them into account when benchmarking international offices. Although there is a visible trend towards managing public institutions like companies, a robust tool for measuring the performance of international offices, matching these performances with the priorities of exchange students and identifying efficiency wins, which can be used widely, has not yet been developed. It should be mentioned from the start, however, that only using tools based on numbers is not sufficient to take management decisions at international offices. Working with people and working in multicultural environments make the need for correct interpretation of the outcomes substantial. Benchmarking is not an endpoint, but a tool to reach the final objective: it should identify needs for improvement and find out best practices, which can then in their turn be implemented by the universities. Purpose of the study The purpose of this study is to develop a robust benchmarking model to improve the services for incoming exchange students at international offices of universities, and to implement the model at TH Wildau and Vives South University College.


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International offices of universities work in a competitive international environment and are at the heart of universities’ reputations. Moreover, in times of crisis and budget cuts, it is more important than ever before that their expenditures are legitimate and budgets managed properly. The trend of implementing business-based approaches for managing public institutions is an interesting way to deal with the challenges faced by international offices, and must be explored. In order to develop a robust benchmarking model for international offices, research will be conducted to identify the needs of exhange students. The current debate on benchmarking in higher education and at international offices will be reviewed. Based on the literature review and the priorities of international students, and bearing in mind the professional experience of the researcher, a benchmarking method will then be set up and put in practice at TH Wildau. Afterwards, the model will be presented to different partner universities of TH Wildau to verify the robustness of the model. Due to the link between the model and the preferences of international students, it will be possible to identify the most urgently needed changes at the international office of TH Wildau after having implemented the benchmarking methodology. For the international community, it will be possible to identify good practices. Both the development of this benchmarking methodology and the implementation of this methodology will be done in the last chapter of this work. Research questions In order to develop and implement a robust benchmarking model for comparing and improving service levels of international offices, the following core questions have to be answered:


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a) what are the tasks of the international office when welcoming international students? b) how should the achievements of the international offices be measured? c) what do the outcomes of the model mean for the specific international office? d) what are the priories of exchange students? e) is the benchmarking model useable for different international offices in different countries? Significance to the field It is clear that the benchmarking model will have positive outcomes for the students using the services of international offices once it is properly implemented. But next to the students, there are many other parties who definitely have an interest in the outcomes of the study. Firstly, TH Wildau could have the ability to improve its international image via optimising service levels for its exchange students. Next to this, other universities participating in the project will have the same opportunity. In a later stage, once this study is published and other universities can build upon our methodology, these other universities, in their turn, will be able to benefit from the study when organising their international offices. In a wider, European perspective, the conclusions of this study can be of interest for the European Commission and the National Erasmus+ agencies of the countries participating in the programme (these are organisations facilitating the Erasmus+ project in the 28 EU member countries plus Liechtenstein, the Republic of Macedonia, Norway, Iceland and Turkey). For them, the methodology used in this study could be of use when developing similar benchmarking initiatives across the European Union. Next to this, the best practices that are identified in this study can help these agencies and institutions to develop instructions on how universities should manage their international offices.


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As stated in the background section of this chapter, the funds available for the Erasmus+ project have risen by 40 per cent and it is important to spend this money in a wise way. The conclusions of this work are definitely of interest for those people analysing the outcomes of the Erasmus+ project, as, via keeping an eye on the conclusions of this work, they can both get an impression of the service levels for exchange students, and identify the evolution of these service levels. On the political level, this work could be used as an argument for those calling for more student mobility and a stronger Erasmus+ project. This study is an example of the willingness of universities to improve and simplify student mobility in the EU, and shows that there are people and institutions caring about how we should spend the Erasmus+ budget in the most optimal way. Definitions International office. In popular language, the international office of a university is referred to as the division of an university which is responsible for international contacts with other universities. It is responsible for both developing and maintaining partnerships with other universities, and is responsible for facilitating the exchange of both academic staff and students to universities abroad. Both incoming (coming from a different university) and outgoing (going to a different university) students and professors are usually helped by the international office. Within the scope of this thesis, the term international office refers to the part of the division of the university responsible for the incoming students.


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Exchange student. When speaking about an exchange student in this work, we mean a student of foreign origin who is on a study visit at the host university. He or she is not staying at the host university for the entire duration of his study programme. Limitations Unfortunately, the benchmarking study developed in this thesis has some limitations. First of all, it must be said that the model is based on the own experiences at the international office of TH Wildau of the author of this work, and the core ideas of it are thus without any doubt interlinked with the tasks of the international office at TH Wildau. Although special attention has been paid to make sure the model is robust and useable at various international offices, in different countries, at different types of universities and at universities with different numbers of (exchange) students, research has shown that different international offices have different task packages. Our model needs to be implemented at more universities before one can be fully sure it is robust. In addition to this point, it must be mentioned that the author of this work is personally involved in the operations of the international office at TH Wildau. Although we have been cautious about this, there still is a risk for subjective views. For this reason, the model has been developed and conclusions have been made based on objective criteria where it was possible. A third main issue can be identified when discussing the preferences of the students using services of international offices. Due to time constraints and the need for severe amounts of data, the preferences of students have only been asked to the foreign students coming to study at TH Wildau during summer semester 2014. For now, we have refrained from developing in-depth recommendations for the international offices of the foreign partner university of our project


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based on the priorities of the exchange students at TH Wildau, as it could be that a student willing to study in Germany finds that help when looking for a dormitory in the capital city of Germany is more important than a student willing to study in a regional Spanish city. He, in his turn, could find help with administrative formalities more important, for example. The priorities of international students must continue to be studied in the future. Not every university has the same population of international students and some universities work closer together with specific countries. For conceptualising the current benchmarking model, a broad group of exchange students at TH Wildau has been asked which services they find important from the international office of the university. If the model is used at different universities or in different countries, however, more research should be done towards identifying the priorities of students in different countries. For the current model, certain countries, like Germany or the United States of America, have not given their opinion in the survey. This, together with the rather small peer group, makes the model viable for errors. It is clear that the right interpretation of the outcomes of the model is key. The benchmarking model provides us with a basic framework, but there is usually a story behind the figures, which gives deeper insight in how to improve services at international offices. Cultural differences should not be ignored when interpreting the outcomes of our benchmarking study. A last limitation of the benchmarking study is that it does not take into account the academic success of international students. The model is clearly directed towards improving administrative formalities, housing and integration stimulating events for incoming exchange students. The info derived from the model could thus be misinterpreted: even though the support for exchange students can be very good at a specific university, it is not said that its international students perform well academically.


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Literature review Introduction Within the following chapter of this thesis, we will review current developments related to the topic of this work. For each article used in a research area of this thesis, the following three questions will be answered: 1) how is this study related to this thesis, 2) what is the main outcome of this study, and 3) what are major limitations and weaknesses of this study. As the goal of this thesis is not just to develop purely theoretical ideas, but a benchmarking model that can be used in practice, the literature review has been designed to specifically suit this objective. The literature review can be split up in four key parts: in the first part we deal with the tasks of the international office, which we will afterwards evaluate within the benchmarking model. The second part focuses on the priorities of exchange students when going abroad. The third part of the literature review focuses on benchmarking processes and models, and the fourth and last part focuses on the outcomes of benchmarking studies at international offices. Figure 1 Structure of the literature review of this thesis (own creation)

We see from the graph that there is some overlap between the different sections of the literature review (processes & models used by international offices and outcomes of benchmarking at international offices). Here, we see that the studies we have identified as being


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relevant for this thesis provide us with valuable information for both sections of the literature review. We will therefore discuss both the processes & models used when benchmarking services of international offices and outcomes of benchmarking at international offices in the same chapter. Firstly, we will contemplate the tasks of international offices within the framework of the ERASMUS project of the European Commission. We will dive into the core regulations voted by the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament, and then bridge with documents provided by the European Commission, which provide us with more detailed information on how student mobility is organised. We will then identify the implications of the project for the thesis and our benchmarking model. Secondly, we will dive into the preferences of exchange students when arriving at their foreign university. We will try to identify the key priorities of students when going abroad, so that the importance of the different tasks can be taken into account within the benchmarking model. In order to get a better understanding of how benchmarking is conducted at universities and their international offices, we will review literature in this domain. Via academic research and reports of benchmarking projects, we will review the processes and models used in benchmarking in higher education. Here, we will first focus on the evolution of benchmarking methodologies and practices in higher education over time. Afterwards, we will review processes and models that have been specifically developed to benchmark at international offices of universities.


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We will also review the core outcomes of these studies. Here, we will try to identify issues that have remained unanswered till present. This will help to strengthen the benchmarking model and the usability of its outcomes. ERASMUS (+) Introduction. As stated in the introduction of this thesis, we will use the ERASMUS programme as the basic foundations of the benchmarking model we want to develop, due to the fact that it provides us with a thorough setting, the outcomes of 25 years of experience on which we can build and a well-defined and regulated system in which student mobility can take place. However, it is clear that not every exchange student goes abroad under the conditions of ERASMUS, and for that reason we will not limit ourselves to the needs of ERASMUS students, and get a more wide perspective of students’ needs where necessary and/or meaningful. As the European Union only introduced the Erasmus+ programme in January 2014 as a successor to the original ERASMUS programme, no significant academic articles on the implementation of the updated programme at international offices, which are relevant for the topic of this thesis, have been published yet. It is therefore necessary to take a broader look at these new regulations before conceptualising a benchmarking model for comparing services at international offices. To get a clear insight, we decided to take a look at the core EU legislation and the executive orders provided by the European Commission to identify the objectives and priorities of the Erasmus+ programme and their implications for this thesis. As the main objectives of implementing a benchmarking model for service levels at international offices are improving and


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controlling the outcomes of the project, we have also tried to identify the way these two objectives are implemented in the project on the EU level. We will firstly dive into Regulation 1288/2013 of 11 December 2013 establishing ‘Erasmus+’, which organises the Erasmus+ project in a legal way, and afterwards review the implications of the two most important executive orders for this thesis, the Erasmus+ programme guide and the ERASMUS Charter for Higher Education 2014-2020. Regulation (EU) 1288/2013. Regulation 1288/2013 of 11 December 2013 establishing ‘Erasmus+’ sets out the legal framework in which the Erasmus+ programme operates. Although the Regulation does not inform us about how student mobility should be structured inside the EU, it can be read through a different perspective: one could try to identify the EU objectives that can be fulfilled by implementing the benchmarking model. Chapter VI of the Regulation focuses on the performance, results and dissemination of the programme. Although the chapter mainly focuses on how the European Commission should monitor and report the results of the Erasmus+ programme, objective 30 of the Regulation, however, specifies that “effective performance management, including evaluation and monitoring, requires the development of specific, measurable and realistic performance indicators which can be measured over time and which reflect the logic of the intervention” (Regulation (EU) 1288/2013 of 11 December 2013 establishing ‘Erasmus+’: the Union programme for education, training, youth and sport and repealing Decisions, p. 53). As the benchmarking model will fulfil the criteria needed for effective performance management, be it at university level, we could say that the initiative could become of key interest for the development of the Erasmus+ programme.


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Secondly, we see that Key Action 2 of the programme focuses on cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices. As our benchmarking model is planned to compare service levels of international offices of universities across borders and identify good practices within the scope of welcoming exchange students at universities, we can say that it suits Key Action 2 of the programme. Erasmus+ programme guide. The Erasmus+ programme guide is a document prepared by the European Commission, in which it puts into words the Erasmus+ programme in a detailed way. It describes priorities and gives specific information on the different Actions of the programme and the available budget. For this thesis, the programme guide is the core document to understand the overall structure of the Erasmus+ programme. As this guide does not speak about how international offices should support students when going abroad, it does not directly affect the benchmarking model that we will develop. However, the programme guide yields insight into broader objectives of Erasmus+ and clearly underlines the importance of measuring and publishing the outcomes of the specific projects. From the guide we learn that the benchmarking model of this thesis is linked with Key Action 1 of the Erasmus+ programme: Learning Mobility of Individuals. Within Key Action 1, the Erasmus Charter for Higher Education describes the criteria a university must meet before it can participate in the Erasmus+ project on learning mobility of professors and students: The award of an Erasmus Charter for Higher Education (ECHE) is a pre-requisite for all higher education institutions established in a Programme Country that wish to participate in a Higher Education mobility project. Every year, the European Commission - via the


29

Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency – publishes a specific call for proposals that sets the detailed conditions to be followed and qualitative criteria to be met in order to be awarded with an ECHE (European Commission, 2014c, p. 39) As we go through the programme guide, it becomes clear that the focus of Erasmus+ is the improvement of employability of young people combined with the valorisation of skills that are not necessarily taught at school or university. The benchmarking model should keep in mind these European objectives so that it can be used as a relevant policy instrument. ERASMUS Charter for Higher Education 2014-2020. The ERASMUS Charter for Higher Education lays out the different criteria that a university should fulfil when taking part in the programme. It provides us with a very good overview of those things a university should do when welcoming exchange students. The main tasks for the receiving institution are as follows (European Commission, 2014b): a) prepare a Learning Agreement specifying the courses followed abroad, b) prepare a Transcript of Records at the end of the exchange period, c) publish and update a course catalogue on the website of the institution, d) offer help to students needing visas, e) inform students about obtaining health insurance, f) help students to find accommodation, g) make sure foreign students are treated equally like domestic students, h) integrate the exchange students in the university life, i) provide mentoring and support to exchange students, j) offer language courses where necessary.


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Moreover, the Charter also identifies a few best practices and tries to give insight in how the host university should cope with its tasks. Where possible, the Charter provides deadlines. The ECHE therefore is a key document when setting up a benchmarking model. Although the Charter is a great source of information for setting up the benchmarking model for services of international offices, it is not sufficient. It stands no doubt that the Charter is great in listing up tasks, but evaluating the work of an international office should not be limited to checking these tasks. For several tasks described by the Charter, one could say that the deadlines provided by the ECHE are sufficient to evaluate the performance of the international office. For most tasks, however, we should look further and add more criteria to evaluate the performance of the university. If we want to use the benchmarking model as a policy instrument and management tool, we should look further than the tasks mentioned above. Key performance indicators (KPIs) used to benchmark services in a broader way, such as the amount of communication needed to solve an issue or the accessibility of the international office through different communication channels, are definitely useful to evaluate the service level of the international office of a university. This must be investigated. Conclusion. Taking a look at the Erasmus+ Regulation and executive orders has been beneficial from two points of view. Firstly, the implementation of the benchmarking model will suit both the general idea of performance management within the Erasmus+ programme and Key Action 2 of the programme, which focuses on cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices.


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Secondly, we have been able to identify the key tasks of universities when welcoming exchange students. The ERASMUS Charter for Higher Education lays out these tasks and provides us with some good practices and deadlines which should be respected. However, only using ERASMUS guidelines as the basis of the benchmarking model for comparing service levels of international offices of universities is not sufficient as the tasks of the international office go beyond those listed in the Charter. And if one wants to use the benchmarking tool as a real policy instrument or management tool, the model should not simply be a checklist based on the tasks identified in the Charter. It should bring insight, which could be provided by inserting KPIs related to the provision of services into the benchmarking model. Priorities of exchange students Introduction. We have identified the tasks of international offices as described by the ECHE, but if we want to introduce the idea that students are customers of the services of international offices in the benchmarking model, we should also take a look at the priorities of students when going abroad, so that the service offer of the international office meets the demand of the exchange students. We should therefore try to identify which services provided by the international office of their host university the international students find most important. Although this idea is not completely new, very little useful research is accessible. However, we will check the priorities of exchange students via reviewing a current study on the need for advice and assistance of foreign students at German universities, which was originally developed for the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The study became available in the spring of 2014, making it timely relevant for this thesis. As more than 40 international


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students of TH Wildau replied to the study, the university has received a copy of the study which focuses on the specific outcomes of the survey at TH Wildau. Need for advice and assistance of foreign students at TH Wildau. The 2014 study “Internationale Studierende an deutschen Hochschulen und ihr Bedarf an Beratung und Unterstützung” (International students at German institutions for higher education and their need for advice and assistance), prepared on behalf of the DAAD, gives an overview of the reasons why foreign students study in Germany, informs us about the reasons why foreign students choose to study at a specific university and describes the need for advice and assistance of foreign students in Germany. In the introduction, we have stated that we want to keep in mind the priorities of students when going abroad when developing the benchmarking model, as this makes the conclusions derived from implementing the benchmarking model directly relevant for the exchange students at the university. This specific study provides us with a lot of information on what foreign students want from their host university in terms of advice and assistance. It is thus clear that this study is of vital importance for the development of the model, and that the needs, which are identified in this study, should be taken in mind when developing the benchmarking model. The main relevant outcomes of this study are the tables and conclusions drawn in chapter four. The study has identified the most challenging aspects of both the preparation of studies and the arrival at a German university. These have first been identified according to the origin of the student and then according to the type of university at which the foreign student is studying. In total, 12,194 foreign students have answered the study of which 43 were students at TH Wildau (Gesellschaft für Empirische Studien bR, 2014, pp. 2, 5).


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Table 1 Difficult aspects of preparing the study visit to Germany, according to national origin (in per cent) (Gesellschaft für Empirische Studien bR, 2014, p. 15) Difficult aspects of preparing the study visit to Germany, according to national origin (in per cent)

Western Europe

Central & Eastern Europe

North America

National origin Latin Africa, Northern America Subsahara Africa

Total Asia, Australia & Oceania

Proof of financial means in order to apply for a visa

28

47

31

36

46

53

37

40

Obtaining a visa/resicence permit for Germany

25

42

31

30

38

57

38

38

Application and admission to the German university

28

30

25

26

21

30

30

29

Proof of German knowledge

21

22

19

30

22

31

37

28

Obtaining information about study programme

24

22

21

22

17

26

22

22

Recognition of academic records by the German host university

20

22

20

22

19

23

25

22

Obtaining general information about life in Germany Amount

13

14

12

18

22

24

20

17

(2,559)

(2,708)

(339)

(1,030)

(508)

(939)

(3,112)

(11,195)

Table 2 Difficult aspects of preparing the study visit to Germany, according to type of university and university clusters (in per cent) (Gesellschaft für Empirische Studien bR, 2014, p. 16) Difficult aspects of preparing the study visit to Germany according to type of university and university clusters (in per cent)

TH Wildau

Small Universities of Applied Sciences

Universities of Applied Sciences

Proof of financial means in order to apply for a visa

44

45

40

Obtaining a visa/resicence permit for Germany

34

43

38

Application and admission to the German university

28

26

29

Proof of German knowledge

30

29

28

Obtaining information about study programme

35

22

22

Recognition of academic records by the German host university

25

23

22

Obtaining general information about life in Germany

21

17

17

(43)

(660)

(11,185)

Amount


34

Table 3 Difficulties upon arrival in Germany, according to natioinal origin (in per cent) (Gesellschaft für Empirische Studien bR, 2014, p. 17) Difficulties upon arrival in Germany, according to national origin (in per cent)

Western Europe

Central & Eastern Europe

North America

National origin Latin Africa, Northern America Subsahara Africa

Total Asia, Australia & Oceania

Looking for a place to live

52

49

42

49

54

61

59

53

Contact with local people

30

32

35

44

45

42

42

37

Contact with authorities

20

27

40

28

29

32

24

26

Organisational constraints

24

25

35

25

15

28

18

23

Orientation in the study programme

22

24

22

23

22

25

20

23

Orientation at the university

15

16

17

18

20

23

16

17

Immatriculation at the university

17

11

20

13

12

16

13

14

Orientation at the university and local environment Amount

9

9

8

14

16

18

14

12

(2,568)

(2,713)

(340)

(1,032)

(513)

(949)

(3,124)

(11,239)

Table 4 Difficulties upon arrival in Germany, according to type of university and university clusters (in per cent) (Gesellschaft für Empirische Studien bR, 2014, p. 17) Difficult aspects of preparing the study visit to Germany according to type of university and university clusters (in per cent)

TH Wildau




37

45

53

Contact with local people

40

37

37

Contact with authorities

46

25

26

Organisational constraints

34

20

23

Orientation in the study programme

24

19

23

9

12

17

Immatriculation at the university

12

11

14

Orientation at the university and local environment

12

12

12

(43)

(665)

(11,222)

Orientation at the university

Amount


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We see that before coming to Germany, students in general find proving their financial situation the hardest part of the preparation. Linked with this, students also find the visa application process difficult. Once students are in Germany, however, organisational constraints and the procedure to obtain a residence permit are less difficult then finding a place to live and getting in touch with local students. A second interesting outcome of the study is an overview of the different services provided by the international office that have been used by the foreign students. Here, we see that the study remains rather unclear about the specific tasks of the international office. The element ‘General consultancy for international students’ could consist of several different tasks, making this table very vague.


36

Table 5 Claimed service offer at the university for foreign students according to type of university and university clusters (in per cent, multiple mentions allowed) (Gesellschaft für Empirische Studien bR, 2014, p. 27) Claimed service offer at the university for foreign students according to type of university and university clusters (in per cent, multiple mentions allowed)

TH Wildau



General consultancy for international students

44

47

39

Orientation events

44

44

36

German courses

40

43

36

Consultancy on academic issues

28

38

32

Help for immatriculation at the university

40

43

32

Excursions

42

43

30

Support in finding a place to live

35

36

29

Cultural events, events on Germany and the German culture

35

36

25

Buddy-programmes for interantional students

47

32

25

Cultural and sport activities

28

35

24

Consultancy on other organisational issues

35

31

24

Supporting courses (e.g. Academic writing, intercultural skills)

21

29

22

Consultancy on financial issues

19

27

21

Tutoring programme for academic support

16

22

20

Help when looking for an internship

12

27

18

Special courses and working groups on academic topics

14

24

17

9

19

14

49

45

52

(43)

(671)

(11,294)

Consultancy by an ombudsperson for students No use of any assistance Amount

The study has also tried to identify the need for different service offers for foreign students. Here, we see that in general the help to find a place to live and a career placement service are asked very often by foreign students.


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Table 6 Wish for more or different service offers at the university for foreign students according to type of university and university clusters (in per cent, multiple mentions allowed) (Gesellschaft für Empirische Studien bR, 2014, p. 31) Wish for more or different service offers at the university for foreign students according to type of university and university clusters (in per cent, multiple mentions allowed)

TH Wildau



No further assistance needed

44

26

23


23

39

47

Finding a job

37

49

47

Career counseling

33

38

38

Social contacts and leisure activities

23

29

33

Legal consultancy

21

32

33

Offers to learn the German language

19

30

30

Consultancy on financial issues

21

27

29

Help on organisational constraints

14

19

27

Consultancy on academic issues

23

21

24

2

5

4

(43)

(670)

(11,259)

Miscellaneous Amount

Although the study provides us with a clear overview of the difficulties students have when going abroad, it is not 100 per cent clear that these difficulties reflect the priorities of students when coming to Germany. Although the study shows where international offices should improve services by asking if foreign students were satisfied by certain services, it does not fully rank the different tasks carried out by the international office of the host university according to what students find most important. In other terms: it could be that, although a student finds orientation at the new university important, he or she does not have difficulties with this because, generally spoken, international offices organise this in a good way.


38

The same goes for table five: although most students do not ask for more language courses, the current service offer of the university has not been taken into account and we can thus not really identify priorities. It could be, for example, that all German universities offer language courses, and that this priority of the students is fulfilled. On the other hand side, it could be that very few students are interested in taking language courses, and that the course offer is too big and thus suboptimal from a budgetary point of view. A second point of critique on the study is the rather low amount of participants from TH Wildau. On 31 October 2013, there were 740 foreign students immatriculated at TH Wildau, that is about 17.44 per cent of the total student population (TH Wildau, 2014, p. 8). The study, however, is only based on the opinion of 43 foreign students at TH Wildau, and one could thus seriously question the representativeness of the study at TH Wildau. For foreign students coming to Germany, however, the study looks representative with 12,194 participants (in total, 192,853 foreign students were registered in Germany in the winter semester 2012-2013 (Gesellschaft für Empirische Studien bR, 2014, pp. 2-3). If we want to develop an internationally valid model, however, we should not just look at this study. Although its outcomes are valuable and relevant for the German higher education sector, one should not ignore German students going abroad (which are not taken into account in this study), and we should filter out those needs of students that are only applicable when coming to Germany. This is a severe task. A last weakness of the study is that it is not directly based on the tasks of the international office of the host university. By measuring difficulties of students, needs for assistance and wishes for more help, the study has been very broad, which makes it difficult to implement the outcomes of the study in our benchmarking model.


39

The real valuable content of the study is the reasoning and the ideas to improve services that are provided by the study. To a certain extent, these are usable as criteria for measuring the performance of the international offices, as they partly indicate how international offices should help foreign students. Conclusion. After having looked for priorities of exchange students in terms of support from the international office at the host university, we can say that we should be cautious about implementing priorities of students into our benchmarking model. First of all, it is clear that, due to the lack of available research and relevant reports, if we want to implement priorities of exchange students, we will need to hold a survey in order to clearly identify those priorities. We have seen from the study on the need for advice and assistance of foreign students at TH Wildau that it is challenging to draw conclusions because questioning a big peer group is necessary to draw conclusions on the priorities of exchange students. On the university level, it looks possible to study this within the scope of this thesis, as the needed peer group is small enough to draw representative conclusions. However, the core objective of this thesis is to develop a robust benchmarking model that can be used internationally. We should therefore look at priorities of students in a broader, international way. We have seen from the study we reviewed that this is very hard because students’ priorities differ from host country to host country. Even if one could identify a global list of students’ priorities, it would take a tremendous amount of time to prepare this list. This is not the key aim of this thesis. We will therefore have to identify the priorities of students by ourselves and use a more pragmatic approach when implementing the priorities of exchange students in our benchmarking model.


40

Benchmarking in higher education Introduction. In order to get a better understanding about how benchmarking is conducted at universities, we will now review literature on benchmarking processes used in higher education. The aim of the review is to identify the evolution of benchmarking in higher education and get an insight into benchmarking models and processes used at present. We will also try to identify where the model that will be developed in this thesis, can bring new insight. We have opted to go through some of the key literature on the topic in chronological order, so that the evolution of benchmarking at universities becomes explicitly visible. At the same time, this will give us the possibility to develop a benchmarking model which builds on the most recent trends and ideas and complies with the most recent prerequisites on benchmarking in higher education. Following a chronological order when reviewing literature in this topic will make it easier to identify the gaps in the research and develop new insights, which will strengthen both the benchmarking model we want to develop and the academic value of this thesis. We will firstly dive into a study on benchmarking in higher education, which was developed on behalf of UNESCO in 1998 and lays out the evolution of benchmarking at universities from the early 1990s. We will then continue the review by diving into a publication from 2002, which focuses on benchmarking as a tool for identifying best practices. The work tries to identify good practices in benchmarking by discussing five case studies on benchmarking in higher education. During the last part of the review on benchmarking at universities, we will analyse the most recent developments in benchmarking in European higher education. Here, we will review


41

both a handbook and a practical guide to benchmarking in European higher education, which was developed by the European Centre for Strategic Management of Higher Education (ESMU) in 2010. These two publications were the result of a benchmarking project that was supported by the European Commission. Benchmarking in higher education. In 1998, the UNESCO released a monograph on benchmarking in higher education in its series ‘New Papers on Higher Education’. This study was conducted by the Commonwealth Higher Education Management Service, and can be seen as the founding publication on benchmarking at universities. “The present report focuses on the concept and practice of benchmarking which has emerged as a popular strategy to enhance the quality and effectiveness of institutional management” (Schofield et al., 1998, p. 1). Although some specific initiatives on benchmarking in higher education had already been carried out, and (Alstete, 1995) already published an important manual on benchmarking in higher education, this monograph is the first publication which provides a practice-oriented insight on the topic, by aiming to draw conclusions based on both benchmarking theory and specific projects carried out in higher education environments. The monograph consists of seven chapters, each of them written by a different author. The first two chapters give an overview of the different benchmarking approaches and issues in higher education. The following five chapters yield insight in how benchmarking is conducted in different parts of the world. For this thesis, the first two chapters of the monograph are the most interesting as they sketch the need for benchmarking and the different approaches of benchmarking. Moreover, the trend towards more benchmarking and reasons for benchmarking are laid out. The conclusions of the other chapters, however, are not of key interest for conceptualising a benchmarking model


42

for services of international offices, as they describe benchmarking projects from an outsider perspective. On the other hand side, going through these chapters does - to some extent - provide us with insight on the key issues of implementing benchmarking in higher education, to which we could anticipate when conceptualising the benchmarking model and implementing it at TH Wildau. First of all, the monograph lays out that benchmarking is a successful approach for changing processes at universities. (Schofield, 1998a, p. 5) argues that “the methodology of benchmarking with its conceptual emphasis on openness of analysis, organisational learning, and an examination of processes rather than a narrow focus on input or output data […] fits a university culture more comfortably than other forms of change management”. The author also makes clear that benchmarking should be an on-going and systematic process. We should keep these conditions in mind when discussing monitoring systems for our benchmarking study. In the second chapter, (Schofield, 1998b, p. 20-21) refers to the (Alstete, 1995) work on benchmarking in higher education, in which the author defined four types of benchmarking in higher education. In the study we are reviewing, however, a fifth type of benchmarking, implicit benchmarking, is also mentioned. According to the author, benchmarking initiatives at universities can be categorised in five types: a) internal benchmarking, where different departments within one university are compared; b) external competitive benchmarking, where the performance of certain departments of different competing universities is compared; c) external collaborative benchmarking, where the performance of certain departments of different non-competing universities is compared;


43

d) external trans-industry benchmarking, where innovative practices are identified across industries; e) implicit benchmarking; where benchmarking is initiated by a central institution in order to compare universities in a competitive way. For this thesis, we will develop a benchmarking model of type c, and where possible try to also implement some ideas of type d. Next to the different types of benchmarking initiatives, the study also defines five main benchmarking methodologies: a) ideal type standards, where practices are compared with a predefined best practice; b) activity based benchmarking, where a selected number of activities are analysed and represent the entire university; c) vertical benchmarking, where costs and performance of one department of the university are quantified; d) horizontal benchmarking, where a single process is is evaluated across several departments of the university, e) use of comparative performance indicators, where the aim is to publish rankings of universities according to performance. For this thesis, we will develop a benchmarking method based on methodology a and d. At the time this study was published, there had only been one study of the same type with a similar methodology: in Canada, the University of Toronto obtained data via participating in the American AUDE project. Afterwards, the university identified the institutions that had the best practices and then visited these institutions to get a better understanding of these best practices. This was a fairly successful approach, but at the same time the author argues that it is a


44

very individualised approach and informal way of benchmarking. For this thesis, it will thus be important to develop a clear model and a more common methodology to analyse and implement best practices. Thirdly, the study identifies several issues when benchmarking in higher education. These can be structured in two main types: management and implementation issues, and methodology and process issues. Speaking about the first type, (Schofield, 1998b, p. 25) argues that these issues are similar when implementing similar quality management initiatives: “it is difficult to identify many key implementation factors which do not also apply to [Total Quality Management], the implementation of IS0 900 1, and to other quality systems”. According to the author, methodology and process issues depend on the benchmarking type and methodology. No further details are given. Although the study gives us an insight in the basic principles of benchmarking at universities, provides us with a platform of benchmarking concepts and types, yields insight in the evolution of benchmarking in higher education and sums up adequate reasons why benchmarking is a good methodology to improve processes in the world of higher education, it does have one key limitation. Due to the fact that several parts of the monograph only describe benchmarking projects from an outsider perspective, the study lacks insight in the practical implementation of benchmarking models and projects in higher education. One could argue that a publication by the UNESCO does not simply want to list facts, but also wants to sensitise its audience - be it in an academic and objective way. However, from our point of view, the monograph does not use these chances well enough. Although the explanations the strengths of benchmarking are mentioned, and reasoning why benchmarking is a good option for improving performance in higher education is dully provided in the publication, a more


45

practical view on the topic and a view from inside when discussing specific cases could have been beneficial for the monograph in our opinion. A last point of critique is that the study does not try to identify the best benchmarking technique for the specific topic one is willing to benchmark. Although the study lays out certain different benchmarking types and methods, more insight could have be provided by adding reasons why one should opt for a specific type or model of benchmarking. Benchmarking in the Improvement of Higher Education. In 2002, the European Network for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA) held a conference on benchmarking in higher education where it tried to both solve problems and identify good principles in benchmarking in higher education. Moreover, the organisation developed recommendations for future benchmarking projects at universities. (Hämäläinen, 2003) developed conclusions on the conference in the report, which we will now review: As a result of the European Pilot Projects in the field of external quality assurance during the nineties, participants felt the need for further exchange of information and experience in a relatively new field in order to provide an opportunity for mutual learning. From these first steps, ENQA has developed from a discussion forum […] into an elaborated association with a wide membership across Bologna signatory countries in Europe with a firm political role (Crozier, Costes, Ranne, & Stalter, 2010, p. 4) As the ENQA is a key reference in quality assurance in higher education in Europe, we have opted to review a publication of this organisation that focuses on benchmarking. After introducing the seminar that was held in order to develop this paper, chapter two of the report introduces benchmarking in higher education and seeks to define what benchmarking is. The author distinguishes between “true” and “false” benchmarking: “True benchmarking,


46

some said, is always improvement-oriented. Negotiation, collaboration and developing a process for mutual understanding are necessary parts of it. […] False benchmarking is rank-oriented or merely explorative without interest in improvement” (Hämäläinen, 2003, p. 8). The author also developed a scheme describing different methods of benchmarking: Figure 2 Benchmarking space (Hämäläinen, 2003, p. 9)

We can say that the ERASMUS Charter for Higher Education (see above) is a benchmarking method, which basically complies with type 1 of this table. The process is owned externally, the goal of the university is to qualify with the standards and the outcome is to set a certain quality level. However, there is no real aim for ranking universities. Our benchmarking model should therefore focus on the other objectives: exchanging better or best practices to improve service levels. In chapter three, the author develops recommendations on how to benchmark in higher education. This part is particularly interesting for the thesis as it provides concrete principles one


47

should follow when benchmarking in the world of international education. Below a list with the most interesting principles which should be kept in mind when developing our scoring model are listed (Hämäläinen, 2003, p. 11-12): a) we should compare through common criteria, b) we should learn from benchmarking and improve our own practices, c) the different partners in the project should also on the process internally, d) if we set up a ranking, we should first lay out the criteria we will evaluate and we should not just compare quantitative data, e) the project should be carried out on the long term. The different case studies described by the report are particularly interesting for the development of a benchmarking model at international offices. Although the cases are not benchmarking studies carried out at international offices, they do provide us with an extensive insight in the objectives of benchmarking in higher education. Compared to the case studies described in the previous article we reviewed, the cases are discussed from an insider perspective. This makes it possible to see the context from which tendencies and good practices in benchmarking in higher education were filtered out in chapters two and three of the publication. This insight is valuable for developing our own benchmarking model. In comparison to the previous study we have reviewed, we see that since 1998 a lot more benchmarking projects have taken place. Although it is visible that the willingness to benchmark in higher education has grown, it is clear that benchmarking in higher education has not yet been spread widely as a completely professional tool for improving the performance of universities. In comparison to the cases described in the 1998 monograph we reviewed before, some professionalization has taken place, but it is visible that methodologies used at present are not


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completely adapted to the world of higher education yet. However, the ideas laid out by the author do give a clear vision on the principles on which benchmarking should be conducted in higher education in order to get the best returns. The biggest limitation of this study is that does not focus on the specific processes one should follow to benchmark at universities. Some general guidelines are provided, but at the same time a real systematic overview of how the benchmarking process should be rolled out is missing. Referring more to academic literature that is already available could also have strengthened the study. This would have brought more insight. When developing a definition of benchmarking in the framework of higher education, for example, the author should have added more insight and critique when summing up different definitions that are currently used to make his own definition stronger. Benchmarking in European higher education. To conclude our review on benchmarking methodologies used in higher education, we will now review two crucial publications on the topic published in 2010. With support of the European Commission, a project on benchmarking in European higher education was developed over a period of two years, and two publications - a handbook and a practical guide on benchmarking in European higher education - were published. The first publication is a practical guide on benchmarking in European higher education (van Vught et al., 2008). Here, a good overview of the available literature is provided and the basic concepts and practices of benchmarking are explained. The second publication is a handbook on benchmarking in European higher education (van Vught et al., 2010). In this publication, the theory of benchmarking is repeated and a stepby-step approach to benchmarking at universities described. Several good practices are laid out.


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One could say that these publications are key reference works for those willing to implement benchmarking in higher education due to the fact that the publications try to explain benchmarking in higher education from scratch (they sum up to 250 pages). Although their content provides us with a very good and broad overview of the topic, it is clear that a detailed review of every page of these works misses its target and is inefficient for this thesis. We have therefore opted to focus our literature review on the most appealing chapters of the work. For this thesis, chapters four and five of the practical guide on benchmarking are the most interesting, as they yield insight in the evolution of benchmarking in higher education and introduce a useful approach to benchmark at universities. The most interesting parts of the handbook on benchmarking in higher education are chapters four and six, which focus on the methodology one should use when benchmarking in higher education environments. We will first review the methodologies described in both publications, and then review the evolution of benchmarking in higher education in comparison to the previous articles we reviewed. Where the author focuses on benchmarking concepts and practices in the practical guide, he first refers to the two previous publications we reviewed before. Then, the author focuses on KPIs used to benchmark, stating that “KPIs are always partial [… and] indicators are [often] not available, especially not if one wants detailed information about processes within organisations showing how performances are reached” (van Vught et al., 2008, p. 42). When developing a benchmarking model for improving service levels at international offices of universities, we will thus have to put specific focus on the KPIs we will use to benchmark: they should try not to overlap and be focused on retrieving information on the processes used in the organisations we benchmark.


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In the next chapters, the author develops a basic framework, which universities should follow to successfully initiate benchmarking projects. First of all, the author lays out three main criteria which should be fulfilled when setting the goals of a benchmarking project (van Vught et al., 2008, p. 54): a) goals should be communicated explicitly to all stakeholders in the project; b) goals should link to national or European quality assurance and performance measures; c) goals should be liked to the strategies of the university. Next to this, the author states that “the perspective from which the benchmarking exercise is carried out must also be clear” (van Vught et al., 2008, p. 54). As we aim to improve service levels of international offices, it is clear that we should keep in mind the customer-oriented perspective when developing our benchmarking model, rather than exclusively improving internal processes. Thirdly, the author lays out advantages of collaborative benchmarking: “they offer possibilities for further networking and professional development between peers from different institutions” (van Vught et al., 2008, p. 60). Here, it is clear that, next to the positive outcomes of benchmarking, the benchmarking project could thus also have positive outcomes for TH Wildau. As the university has a rather short history and does not have a lot of strong international partners, the benchmarking project within the scope of its international office could reinforce contacts with foreign partners. It is clear that this possible advantage should be kept in mind when selecting benchmarking partners. The author provides the following guidelines for choosing KPIs (van Vught et al., 2008, p. 63): a) don’t just benchmark inputs but also outputs and/or processes;


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b) use quantitative as well as qualitative data; c) measure outcomes in relation to inputs. To finish, the author briefly states that the questionnaire used to obtain the data from the benchmarking partners should be clear and that it could be a good idea to collect qualitative data via visiting the partners. When reporting results, we should make sure they are well-structured, comparable and transparent. In chapter four of the second publication, the handbook on benchmarking in higher education, the author first rephrases the basic theoretical framework from the practical guide. After describing the full benchmarking cycle and performance levels in benchmarking, which are also used in benchmarking projects which are not carried out in higher education, he tries to yield more insight in how to apply the content of that first publication via developing a structure of a collaborative benchmarking project in higher education in chapter 6. This structure consists of four main stages, separated in thirteen different steps.


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Figure 3 Overview of the stages and steps of a typical collaborative university benchmarking process (van Vught et al., 2010, p. 70)

So now that a robust methodology, specially built for collaborative benchmarking in higher education, has been developed and made publicly available, we can review the strengths and weaknesses of it, so that we can learn from the model when developing our own model to benchmark service levels of international offices of universities. The first step when deciding to benchmark is to decide which specific tasks we want to benchmark. Here, specific tasks that are beneficial for all participants in the project should be filtered out from the broader amount of tasks. In general, this is seen as a difficult step in the initiation of a benchmarking project, “because although governance learning is something that is of strategic interest to almost all universities, the particular challenge facing institutions depends to a strong degree on the current state of the university” (van Vught et al., 2010, p. 72).


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Once we have chosen the activities we want to benchmark, we should identify their underlying processes. Here, we should make sure to first agree what good practices are, before we identify KPIs. After we set up the list of good practices, we can proceed by identifying a list of potential KPIs. From this list, we can then select the most important and easiest available KPIs for each process. The next step is to agree on the importance of the different KPIs. The following task is the creation of the balanced scorecard. We should now go through the list of KPIs and make sure that the final list of KPIs includes “[indicators that] cover the whole process cycle, from inputs to outcomes, and therefore provide the broadest perspective on understanding performance” (van Vught et al., 2010, p. 89) . Here, we should make sure to not forget the strategic interests of the benchmarking partners. After we have developed the balanced scorecard, we should ask for the senior management to confirm the set of KPIs. Now it is time to score the institution. Once we have done this, we can continue with comparing the institution to the benchmark, and where possible to benchmarking partners in the project. Here, it is key to add a description of the performance and a reason why this performance is achieved so that in further stages, mutual learning becomes easier. Once this stage is over, we will analyse the performance of the university and develop action plans to improve its performance. This is one of the most individual parts of the benchmarking process, as each partner in the benchmarking project will work with different outcomes of the benchmarking study. First of all, we should identify strengths and weaknesses of the specific university, and then we should develop an action plan to improve performance. “The most critical element of this stage is developing an action plan which is tied to the necessary resources for its implementation, which generally requires support from senior managers” (van Vught et al., 2010, p. 109).


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Once the plan is set up the university should implement it and afterwards provide feedback to the other partners in the project and the broader public. This feedback round should not be skipped, as it gives the partners the possibility to reflect about the outcomes of the benchmarking project and the performance improvements in the domain. It is clear that, although the methodology described above is specifically developed to suit the needs of collaborative benchmarking projects in higher education, some modifications to the methodology will be necessary to suit the specific requirements of this thesis. There are several reasons why we should make changes to this methodology so that it becomes less collaborative in stage one. First of all, it is clear that several good practices have already been defined by the European Commission in the ECHE. As we want to keep in mind the robustness of the benchmarking model, we should not identify best practices again because a good, internationally accepted standard or good practice has already been developed. Secondly, we have to keep in mind the available time to develop this thesis. With only 22 weeks available to complete our study, it is simply impossible to have so many feedback rounds of the different benchmarking project members. Thirdly, we have to bear in mind that this benchmarking project is developed within the framework of a master’s thesis. It stands no doubt that, although feedback of different parties is necessary, the main brainwork needed to develop the benchmarking model and the responsibility for the management of the project lies with the author of this work. Fourthly, the outcomes of collaborative benchmarking are less interesting for the broad public as they are very specific for a small number of partners in the specific benchmarking project. It will therefore be hard to draw conclusions from the project that can be used widely.


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We will therefore have to adapt this collaborative benchmarking methodology so that the strengths of working together remain whilst the management of the project can remain our responsibility. These two publications yield new insight in the evolution of benchmarking in higher education. From a theoretic point of view, very few completely new ideas have been developed since the 2002 paper on benchmarking in the improvement of higher education. We see, however, that the number of benchmarking projects has risen and that, as a result of that, the basic theories on benchmarking at universities have been fine-tuned. Another trend we can identify is the involvement and support of governments in benchmarking projects. Just like the first publication we reviewed, this publication is made possible via government subventions. The organisation, which published the second paper we reviewed, was originally created because of a European project on quality management in higher education. It is clear that governments, both national and supranational, are interested in the benchmarking debate in higher education and are willing to spend money in order to further develop benchmarking at universities. The most important trend we can identify is the clear choice for collaborative benchmarking. Where in the past we saw a list of the possible benchmarking methodologies and later a list of characteristics of good benchmarking, we now see a clear choice for collaborative benchmarking in the world of higher education. In the most recent publication we reviewed, the author has clearly chosen to only develop a methodology for collaborative benchmarking because he states this type of benchmarking is the most useful methodology to identify best practices and improve performance in higher education.


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Conclusion. After reviewing three of the most important publications on benchmarking in higher education, we can say that benchmarking is a very good way to manage quality in higher education environments. As international offices work in this environment, we can therefore conclude that benchmarking is an excellent way tool for improving processes, quality and service levels at international offices of universities. Now that we reviewed literature on benchmarking in higher education, we can conclude that the amount of benchmarking projects initiated in the scope of higher education has clearly risen over the last 15 years. Most publications that are relevant for the debate have been prepared with support of governments. It is thus clear that governments will support the development of benchmarking models for improving service levels at international offices, as they are interested in benchmarking in higher education. We have identified the key characteristics of both good benchmarking methodologies and good KPIs in this chapter. It has been mentioned in different studies, for example, that benchmarking should be an on-going process, that it should be focused on improving performance and that setting up a ranking of universities according to their performance is not the number one priority of benchmarking in higher education and that it should provide a clear and useful insight when one decides to rank anyways. We will put special focus on bearing in mind these remarks when developing our own benchmarking model. Although several benchmarking types have been discussed in this part of the literature review, we can conclude that collaborative benchmarking has become the most appropriate benchmarking methodology to use in higher education environments. Over the last 15 years, a clear tendency towards collaborative benchmarking has become visible.


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We therefore want to develop a benchmarking methodology that is collaborative at heart. However, we will have to modify the benchmarking methodology described in publication three of this literature review in order to make it suitable for international offices, the international dimension in which we are working, the specific interest of governments in the outcomes of our benchmarking project and the specific requirements of this thesis. Benchmarking at international offices Introduction. So far, we have sketched the broad context that is needed to benchmark at international offices. We have reviewed literature on the tasks of universities according to the Erasmus+ regulations of the European Union, the priorities of exchange students and the methodologies used to benchmark in higher education. To conclude this literature review, we will now focus on benchmarking studies and projects that have already been carried out. Our focus will be on the processes used in the studies and their outcomes, so that we can learn from these to both strengthen our benchmarking model and make it more relevant academically. Although quite a few benchmarking studies have taken place at international offices, the number of publications on the topic which are also useful for this thesis are limited. Several studies, for example, have only been conducted at international offices in one country, others have not used the ERASMUS framework to develop the benchmarking model, others have not developed recommendations to improve services and others have focused on internal processes rather than services for incoming students. We will first review a publication of the UK Council for International Student Affairs (UKCISA) in which the organisation benchmarks services for international students in higher education institutions.


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We will then review a publication of the Australian Universities International Directors’ Forum (AUDIF), in which ten different tasks of international offices are benchmarked. Here, a special focus is put on the costs of carrying out the activities of international offices. We will conclude this benchmarking study via reviewing a study by HochschulInformations-System (HIS), in which a benchmarking project, which was carried out at both German and Austrian international offices, is described. AUDIF Benchmarking 2011. The first benchmarking study at international offices we will review is the 2012 study of the Australian Universities International Directors Forum (AUDIF). In this study, 37 universities were asked to provide information to evaluates “ten specific aspects of the international operations of Australian universities in 2011” (Australian Universities International Directors Forum, 2012, p. 1). The study is very focused on the costs of operating an international office, which is interesting for this thesis. In the part of the literature review focusing on benchmarking in higher education, we stated that when comparing universities, one should yield insight. It stands no doubt that a good overview of the budget - but not just the financial budget - available at each institution is a very important indicator to provide this insight. A second interesting chapter of the study is the one on international student services. Here, we see that not all services for foreign students are provided by the international office, but that some are provided by dedicated staff in other apartments of the university. Some services are also provided in mainstream way. The international offices of the universities taking part in this AUDIF study generally help with administrative issues of the students.


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A last interesting part of the study focuses on the accommodation provided to foreign students. Here, we see that, from 31 universities, a small majority of 17 universities refer to a different organisation that is responsible for managing the students’ residences. Most of the time, students only apply to one central point that manages their preferences and application. The universities say they see a clear question of students to get the accommodation arranged by the university. A student states: “[Accommodation] is as important to me as the teaching program basically, I will choose a university which can guarantee accommodation over one that does not, all else being equal” (Australian Universities International Directors Forum, 2012, p. 61) Just like the previous study, the methodology of this study has quite a few issues. Although the different items benchmarked in this study have been compared by several KPIs, the author has not provided good values for the different KPIs and the part on learning from this study is underdeveloped. The most useful part of this study will be the indicators used in the study and the introduction of budget-related parameters. We have also learned that the international office does not directly manage all services provided to foreign students. In order to keep our model robust, we will have to overcome this issue. Here, the ECHE will definitely help us to define the service offer of foreign students, which we will benchmark in an objective and international way. Internationalization in higher education. Results of a German-Austrian benchmarking project. Hochschul-Informations-System eG (HIS) is a German provider of software for the management of universities. In the past, the organisation also conducted social research for universities and advised universities on how to manage their organisations.


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The organisation also has experience in benchmarking at universities and their international offices. In 2010, the organisation published the outcomes of an Austrian-German benchmarking study at international offices it had carried out. This is not the only work of HIS on benchmarking at international offices: from 2011 till 2012, the organisation developed a benchmarking project for the members of the UAS7 alliance (a group of 7 German universities of applied sciences with strong focus on research and internationalisation, (HochschulInformations-System eG, n.d.)). Despite having personally contacted the responsible of this project, the outcomes of this more recent study remain only available to the members of the UAS7 alliance. We will therefore review the 2010 publication of HIS on benchmarking at international offices: “Internationalization in higher education. Results of a German-Austrian benchmarking project” (Schröder & Sehl, 2010). From the publication, chapters one and chapters four to six are the most interesting for this thesis. In addition to that, the annex of the publication, which includes both lists of KPIs and tasks of international offices, is also interesting for the thesis. In chapter one, the author describes the concept and evolution of benchmarking. Further on in the chapter, he goes through the benchmarking process and steps and develops own ideas about the order of the steps used to benchmark. Just like we argued before, the author states that, rather than implementing a completely collaborative benchmarking methodology, setting the basic framework and activities to benchmark on forehand is a good thing to do when benchmarking at the international office of a university: “Only after determining the basic objectives of a benchmarking study in the area of internationalization, the foundation stone for selecting suitable benchmarking partners can be laid” (Schröder & Sehl, 2010, p. 23).


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In chapters four to six, the author describes differences the outcomes of the benchmarking study that has taken place in Germany and Austria. First of all, the different environments in which international offices are working are described. Although the organisation of the country and the availability of third party funds, for example, are very different in both countries, “the proportion of incoming of all universities participating in the benchmarking process is at a high level (between 10 and 25 per cent)” (Schröder & Sehl, 2010, p. 89). Therefore, the study has focused on comparing KPIs that could be influenced by the university itself to draw useful conclusions and identify best practices, which could later on be used cross-border. Then, the author puts specific focus on the service offer for foreign students. First of all, we see that the service offer differs for each group of foreign students: At some universities, the international office is responsible for the admission of non-EU students, at other universities, the international office is only responsible for the admission of students within the Life-Long-Learning programme of the EU and other exchange students. Other international offices do not have any of these tasks (Schröder & Sehl, 2010, p. 98) Secondly, the author tries to identify wheat a good service level for foreign students is. He makes clear that “good support is characterised by not being seen” (Schröder & Sehl, 2010, p. 103). Within this benchmarking project, KPIs have been set up to evaluate the performance of universities for eight core themes on which successful support for foreign students is built: language support, organisational support, social-cultural support, academic support, standards of care, study success, satisfaction and qualitative markers. From our point of view, the outcomes of benchmarking these 8 themes could generate overlap and do not clearly show needs for better support for foreign students, as they are not based on the core support needs for foreign students.


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If a student does not find a place to live, for example, this could show up in several of the abovementioned benchmarking themes, but it would require more time to identify where better assistance is needed. A last important item that is mentioned in this topic is the National Code of Conduct for German Universities Regarding International Students, developed by the German Rectors’ Conference. The author is right when doubting about the effectiveness of the codex as sign of quality, as the universities, which have signed the Charter, do not have to prove that they fulfil the standards laid out in it. However, the standards, which are described within the Codex, could be used to identify what good practices are in our benchmarking model, and could therefore be of use when developing the benchmarking model for international offices. After benchmarking the universities and comparing them with these requirements, we could - at least partly - be able to say if a university complies with the Codex or not. In the next chapter of the study, the author describes the different KPIs that have been used to benchmark universities. We can also find a full list of these KPIs in the annex of the publication. Unfortunately, the list does not contain a lot of indicators that are specifically useable to benchmark the level of service for foreign students. Only two KPIs are mentioned when speaking about services for foreign students: amount of participants to social-cultural events and number of staff available for assistance to foreign students. From the list of tasks of international offices when welcoming incoming international students, we see that the majority of the international offices is responsible for giving advice to foreign students and giving intercultural workshops. All other tasks are not always the direct responsibility of the international office of the university. As we want to develop a benchmarking model that specifically focuses on the services for foreign students, we will thus


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have to think about the influence of other organisations on the service offer. This will be a major hurdle to developing a robust benchmarking model. We can also see from this list that it will not be possible to set up a list of activities that are carried out by all international offices that can then be benchmarked. We will therefore have to use the ERASMUS Charter of Higher Education as a basis to make our benchmarking model usable across universities, because this list does provide us with a more complete list of tasks which have to be carried out by the host university when welcoming exchange students. Benchmarking the provision of services for international students in further education institutions. In 2008, UKCISA published the outcomes of a benchmarking study on the provision of services for international students in the United Kingdom. The idea was “to enable the sector as a whole to consider the level of services currently provided and individual institutions to compare their performance against others to see whether and where improvements might be made” (UK Council for International Student Affairs, 2008, p. 3). An almost identical study was repeated in 2011. During these studies, UKCISA has asked 68 institutions of higher education in the UK to fill out a survey on the services offered to their international students. A broad range of different services was questioned: from pre-departure assistance over accommodation to social activities: the participating universities were asked to both tell if and how certain services are offered. This gives a good insight in the average service level for foreign students in the UK. We see, for example, that in 2008, 57 per cent of the universities who participated in the study assisted their international students in finding accommodation through long-term home stay options. Accommodation agencies and temporary accommodation when arriving in the UK


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are also often used to help students finding accommodation. We also see that orientation programmes for foreign students at the host university are most often held at the beginning at the academic year. Only a minority of higher education institutions (43 per cent) offer on-demand sessions in person all year round (UK Council for International Student Affairs, 2008, pp. 4, 15). However, the publications on the studies have several shortages in our opinion. First of all, the author of the studies has not clearly determined what good values or good practices are for the different questions in both studies. Although most of the time a basic idea about the average service level can be estimated via going through the questions in the studies, it is very hard to identify good practices let be good processes via studying the publications on this benchmarking project. If one wants to really benchmark the provision of services to international students, defining good practices is key so that partners can learn how to improve their services. Here, the project managers have made a key mistake: they undervalued the learning aspect of benchmarking, which should be the key objective of carrying out a benchmarking project. A second issue with the methodology of this project is that the different institutions have not given feedback about how they implemented changes at their institutions. Although not sharing the outcomes of the project at one specific university can be legitimate, the publications should have had specific and rather extensive a part on this. The publications aim to both inform and convince the higher education institutions in the UK about how to improve service levels for foreign students, and should thus give the public the possibility to reflect about the strategies used to improve services, and also the outcomes of the benchmarking project and the performance improvements in the domain, as described before.


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Thirdly, we can say that the indicators used in these studies are not well structured. In our opinion, studying a rather limited amount of services for international students in the UK in a more profound way would have been more beneficial for the participants in this project. The most useful part of this project is without any doubt the questionnaire that can be found in the annex of the first publication of the project. Some of the questions asked here could also be used to develop the KPIs in our benchmarking model. Conclusion. We have now reviewed several publications on benchmarking projects at international offices. We clearly see that, although quite a few benchmarking studies have been carried out at international offices, not many focus on services for exchange students and a lot of methodology-related issues remain in place. We see that most of the benchmarking studies have not implemented a complete benchmarking cycle: KPIs are not always developed to give insight on specific tasks or processes of the organisation, good values for KPIs are often not set up, recommendations for improvements are missing and the learning effects of implementing the benchmarking project are most of the time not mentioned. Moreover, only a minority of the benchmarking projects at international offices are collaborative although literature tells us that a collaborative benchmarking methodology is the most appropriate for benchmarking in higher education environments. But although the methodologies used in the first two studies we reviewed can be improved, the KPIs that have been used will definitely be a source of inspiration for the benchmarking model developed in this thesis. From the last study we reviewed, we have learnt that the tasks carried out by international offices change from university to university. We will therefore have to use a different approach


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to better benchmark services for students. Here, the EU perspective, with the ECHE, can provide us with a solution, as the Charter formalises the service offer for exchange students in the EU. Benchmarking these tasks should be possible across universities as all European universities participating in students’ exchange should comply with the Charter and thus offer them. Conclusion We have now reviewed literature in several domains related to this thesis. First of all, we have positioned the benchmarking model within the Erasmus+ project. Here, we see that the benchmarking model and study we want to develop perfectly suits the broader objectives of the Erasmus+ project in terms of performance management and the specific Action Plan on the exchange of good practices. We have also reviewed the ERASMUS Charter for Higher Education, and identified a list of tasks that should be carried out by the host university under ERASMUS student mobility. In the second part of the review, we have tried to identify the priorities of exchange students in terms of advice and assistance by the host university when going abroad. Here, we have seen that, due to the fact that very little research on the topic is accessible and big peer groups are necessary to study the priorities of students, it will be very difficult to implement these priorities in the benchmarking model. Thirdly, we have studied benchmarking projects and methodologies in higher education. Via reviewing different publications on the topic in chronological order, we have visualised the evolution of benchmarking in higher education over the last 15 years. The evolution of benchmarking theories and methodologies is clearly driven by the execution of benchmarking projects and is supported by governments. We have figured out that the most visible trend is directed towards collaborative benchmarking. Where in the past literature was only describing


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different ways of benchmarking, we now see a clear trend towards ‘true’, collaborative benchmarking, which is said to be the benchmarking methodology that suits best higher education environments because university atmospheres are used to working together and exchanging ideas. We have reviewed a collaborative benchmarking methodology that will be the basis of our benchmarking model for improving services for international students at international offices. This basic methodology will, however, need some fine-tuning to suit the specific needs of this thesis. In the last part of the literature review we has focused on benchmarking at international offices. Although quite a few studies have taken place at international offices, not many projects have focused on benchmarking services for incoming exchange students. Moreover, a vast majority of the studies that have been carried out so far have methodology-related issues. One study, however, has shown us the divergence in tasks carried out by different international offices, which makes it very hard to compare international offices. This illustrates the need to develop our benchmarking model via comparing tasks of host universities according to the ECHE rather than comparing tasks of specific international offices. The benefits of carrying out a collaborative benchmarking study based on the tasks described in the ECHE will be significant: due to its robustness, it will be easier to collect data and compare it with different universities. But the outcomes will not only be of use for the specific benchmarking partners in the project. When the final results will be published, a university which was not partner at present will be able to quickly see where they can improve their service and how other universities in the project overcame the same issues. Students, in their turn, will benefit from improved services. The outcomes of the benchmarking study will be useful for governments and the European Commission that have given a lot of incentives to

BENCHMARKING AT INTERNATIONAL OFFICES benchmark in higher education, and are keen on performance management, as we discussed before.

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Benchmarking Service Levels of International Offices Introduction After having reviewed the most relevant literature on benchmarking service levels for exchange students, we will now develop our benchmarking model to improve service levels for exchange students at international offices. We will start by describing the benchmarking method we will use to benchmark and will then lay out the specific model we will use in a detailed way. After having developed our benchmarking model, we will review feedback of different universities on the implementability of our theoretical model and methodology, and implement the model at TH Wildau and Vives. Methodology During the literature review we have identified a clear tendency towards collaborative benchmarking. We will therefore introduce the basic principles of a collaborative benchmarking methodology in our model. However, we will have to modify that methodology in order to make it suitable for international offices, the international dimension in which we are working and the specific interest of governments in the outcomes of our benchmarking project. We will also have to make sure the robustness of the model is guaranteed. This could be threatened by implementing a benchmarking methodology that is too focused on the specific needs of a small amount of universities. Moreover, the specific requirements of this thesis also play a role in the methodology. As the thesis is a personal work and not just the description of a project, the personal work should be tangible. We have therefore opted to develop a benchmarking model that makes feedback from benchmarking partners possible on the places where it is most appropriate and useful.


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Below, the benchmarking methodology we will use is made visible in a graph. Figure 4 Our benchmarking methodology (based on van Vught et al., 2010, p. 70)

The first of four main stages in our benchmarking project is the stage that we call ‘the benchmarking model’. In this step, we will develop the core-benchmarking instrument that we will afterwards use to identify room for improvement of services for exchange students at international offices. Keeping the ECHE in mind, we will identify the tasks we want to benchmark. Then, we will develop a list of KPIs we want to check at the partners in the benchmarking project in order to make a valuable comparison between their service levels. Then, we will identify good practices and good values for the different KPIs to provide insight in the value of the KPIs. Identifying good practices will help us to decide whether a specific university is doing a good job. Once we have identified these good practices, we will set up the balanced scorecard that the benchmarking partners will the use to main measure their performance. So far, we did not introduce collaborative elements in our benchmarking model. This will help us to keep the benchmarking model robust. We have explained the reasons for this keeping the model robust before. However, the most interesting and maybe even ground-breaking


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element we will introduce in our benchmarking project, is a feedback round. We will ask several partners in the project to give their opinion on the balanced scorecard we have developed so that they can forward possible improvements to the model to us. For us, the feedback round looks like the most efficient way to introduce collaborative elements in our benchmarking model while ensuring its robustness, maintaining the involvement of the project responsible and reducing the necessary time to carry out a collaborative benchmarking study. For stage two to four, we will use a benchmarking methodology similar to the one described in the literature review, as this part of the collaborative benchmarking methodology is not contested. The benchmarking model Introduction. We will now develop our benchmarking model. First of all, we will describe the tasks we want to benchmark, and then we will set up a list of KPIs to benchmark these tasks. The next step will be to identify good practices for these KPIs and then we will conclude these first three steps by drawing our balanced scorecard and laying out the exact tool (the scoring modules and scoring key). Once these hurdles have been taken, we will ask for feedback of different universities to make the benchmarking study more collaborative. Needs and tasks. We have seen that benchmarking tasks of international offices from an institutional point of view is very hard to do as the responsibilities of international offices differ across institutions (Schröder & Sehl, 2010, p. 98). We have therefore developed a way to benchmark the tasks of international offices from a different perspective.


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Due to the fact that most of the students have the same basic needs when going abroad (e.g. housing, Learning Agreement, Transcript of Records, …), and that the international office of the host university usually is the responsible for welcoming incoming exchange students, we can thus benchmark the level of service of host universities via comparing the level of service of their international offices for the incoming exchange students. This level of service can be determined by checking how the international office of the host university responds to certain basic needs of exchange students. We could describe our benchmarking method as an outside-in, customer-driven or student-based benchmarking methodology. The advantage of this approach is that it is very robust and widely implementable as the needs of people are the same across countries (Maslow, 1943). Although one could argue that cultural differences have an impact on the needs of people and that the above-mentioned view is very ethnocentric, the very basic needs of people (e.g. housing) are not directly questioned in the academic debate (Hofstede, 1984). However, we must make sure that international offices also answer to the priorities of exchange students. Although most needs of exchange students are universal, some needs might be more important for the exchange students than others according to the situation at the host university. We will therefore implement the priorities of students in an indirect way, via comparing the objective service levels of the different universities with the need for assistance of the exchange students so that the robustness of the core model is guaranteed. Like this, the objective service level can be studied and the service level can be evaluated and improved, without directly having to check the priorities of the exchange students. Although checking the priorities of exchange students does provide institutions with a better insight, good practices can still be exchanged across universities in an objective way, and carrying out huge


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studies to identify the priorities of the exchange students is not directly required. At the same time, as service levels can be assessed independently from the priorities of the exchange students, resources can be saved (e.g. the audit can be carried out every semester by benchmarking the internal processes used that semester and using the priorities of exchange students from past semesters). Although one might argue that the international office of the host university is not responsible for every single service need of its incoming exchange students, the international office should, however, have a clear overview about the level of service provided to incoming exchange students by other stakeholders. The international office is, in most cases, responsible for implementing and carrying out bilateral cooperation agreements with other universities, making a clear overview of what it can and should offer to incoming exchange students of vital importance for the correct execution of its tasks. Although one might also argue that this benchmarking approach does not directly improve the specific processes used by the international office of the host university, benchmarking the performance of the international office via comparing its level of service for incoming exchange students will be valuable for the international office because it will identify the areas where it should provide more help to these students. Once these areas have been identified, the exchange of good practices will in its turn help the international office to improve its processes used for the tasks that need improvements. This indirect approach guarantees the robustness of the benchmarking model as it overcomes both the different ways international offices are organised and the different responsibilities of international offices across universities, regions and countries.


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After having set up a list with the different needs of incoming exchange students based on the literature review and the personal experience both as an exchange student and as a student employee at the international office of TH Wildau, the author of this work has chosen the most important ones and split them up in four different task-oriented categories: internal formalities, external formalities, housing and integration. Next to this, we also have developed a fifth category, ‘general services’, in which we will evaluate KPIs that give insight in and are applicable to all other categories. Under ‘internal administrative formalities’ we understand administrative formalities that should be fulfilled for the exchange student inside the university. These could be, for example, the preparation of the students’ course schedule, issue of his or her students’ ID, verification of the Learning Agreement, preparation of the Transcript of Records, … Under ‘external administrative formalities’ we understand administrative formalities that should be fulfilled outside the university but in the country in which he spends his exchange semester. These, for example, could be help with the issue of the visa (in case the student needs one), registration at the local town hall, opening of a bank account, registration at the health insurance, … Under ‘housing’ we understand help to find suitable accommodation. Under ‘integration’, we understand support to better integrate in the local and university community. Here, language courses, buddy programmes, orientation events, cultural trips, … are considered. To get a better insight, we will also develop KPIs to benchmark the available budget (in the widest meaning of the word) for the tasks described above. This, however, will be hard to achieve as we have learned from the literature review that not only the international office is


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responsible for carrying out the above-mentioned tasks, but that different departments of the university (or in some cases even external organisations) are involved. KPIs. For every category, we have set up a list with KPIs we will benchmark. Although not every single need or formality is benchmarked, the current list should be sufficient to give a good insight in the service level for exchange students and should make it possible to identify the areas in which the international office of the host university can improve its service. First of all, we will benchmark a list of formalities that should be carried out by the host university. We call them internal formalities, and listed them chronologically: a) the issue of the letter of acceptance (or official invitation letter in case the student is not coming from a Shengen country), b) provision of the course catalogue, c) the verification of the Learning Agreement, d) the official matriculation, e) the issue of the students’ ID, f) the preparation of the course schedule, g) the establishment of contact with academic responsibles, h) definition of changes to the learning agreement, i) the issue of the Transcript of Records. For each of these formalities, we will verify if deadlines are respected, count the number of attempts needed to fulfil the formality at the host university and figure out how much communication between the student and host university was necessary to complete the formality.


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Benchmarking these indicators should make it possible to identify good practices and determine the level of service of the international office. Secondly, we will benchmark the following external formalities: a) registration at the local register office, b) enrolment to health insurance, c) getting a residence permit and opening, d) closing of a bank account in the country of the host university. We will compare universities through their service offer and the amount of communication between student and host university which was necessary to fulfil the formality. Here, we cannot easily compare attempts that are necessary to fulfil the formality because this cannot be measured directly by the host university as the process is managed and owned externally. Thirdly, we will benchmark the housing of exchange students. Via comparing the accommodation offer for exchange students, the communication of the housing offer to the exchange students, the distance between the university and the accommodation, and the price of the residence, we will be able to compare the housing situation for exchange students across universities. Fourthly, we will benchmark the integration of exchange students at the host university. We will compare what universities offer to exchange students to improve their integration and will also benchmark the price students have to pay for taking part in these events. Like this, we will be able to identify the different service offer across universities. Fifthly, we will compare three general services for exchange students: via checking the relevant foreign languages spoken by the international office staff, the opening hours of the


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international office and the website of the host university, we will be able to yield better insight in the general service level of the different international offices. As we want to compare the service level with the available budget, we will include an indicator on the budget of the international office: the number of staff available for providing services to incoming exchange students at the international office. Good practices. For some of the tasks of the international office of the host university, governments on several levels have prescribed good practices. Where possible, we have implemented these in the benchmarking model to strengthen its relevance. When speaking about internal formalities, we can find relevant information in the ECHE. The issue of the Letter of Acceptance, provision of course catalogue, verification of the Learning Agreement, establishment of contact with academic responsibles and issue of the Transcript of Records are required formalities when students come to the host university via the ERASMUS programme. In two cases, the ERASMUS Charter provides official deadlines for the internal formalities. The Learning Agreement should be verified before the start of the mobility and the Transcript of Records should be issued “within five weeks after the mobility of the exchange student” (European Commission, 2014b). For the other formalities, no specific deadlines have been set up. Here, we have therefore chosen to set up deadlines based on both the general rule that says that exchange students should be treated like domestic students and the personal experience of the author as an exchange student, so that the incoming students can enjoy a comfortable stay at the host university. The same counts for the correctness and fluency of the execution of the internal formalities. However, due to the fact that these deadlines actually


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depend on the regulations of specific regions, countries or universities, and the subjective thoughts of the author of this work, these deadlines should be questioned in the feedback round on the benchmarking model, and where necessary adjusted. The ECHE also provides us with information on the need for support when overcoming external formalities. It only states that help should be provided by the host university to exchange students when enrolling to a health insurance and when getting a residence permit. However, the Charter does not clearly define what the level of support should be. There is no reference to the other formalities. We have therefore based the good values on our own experiences and the outcomes of the DAAD study on the needs for advice and assistance of foreign students in Germany, which we discussed before. The priorities of the exchange students at the host university, which we will identify later on in this study, should be kept in mind when assessing this category of needs. When speaking about accommodation for exchange students, the ERASMUS Charter for Higher Education stays rather broad. It only asks host universities to “explain clearly to the mobile participants what accommodation options are open to them at the institution (or in its vicinity) and what the conditions for renting accommodation are (i.e. costs, registration and accommodation contract details, responsibilities), so as to minimise any problems on their arrival” (European Commission, 2014b, p. 11). As said before, the Charter also says that exchange students should be treated like domestic students. We have therefore implemented two extra indicators to check if this is the case: the distance between the accommodation and the university, and the price of the dormitory. Here, the aim is to compare both price and distance with the regular students’ accommodations so that this rule can be verified.


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Next to the ECHE, the UK Council for International Student Affairs has published a manual on how to manage accommodation for international students in which certain good practices are described. Particular attention is put on how to communicate the accommodation possibilities and offer to foreign students: Putting the information up front on the institution’s website, ideally room by room, can help manage expectations and control any resentment. The available accommodation options should be set out as plainly and fully as possible – online accommodation floorplans, site plans, local maps and video walkthroughs are all helpful in informing choice (Rushall, 2010, p. 17) We have therefore opted to add an extra indicator within the housing section of our benchmarking model, by which we will benchmark the completeness of the information on the accommodation possibilities. On integration, very few good practices are described by the ECHE. The same counts for the National Code of Conduct for German Universities Regarding International Students, developed by the German Rectors’ Conference: the only requirement is that integrationstimulating events should be provided by the host university (German Rectors’ Conference, 2012). On orientation programmes for foreign students, the UK Council for International Student Affairs has also prepared an extensive handbook. (Green & Healy, 2008) focuses on how to organise these events but does not highlight a limited amount of good practices which give insight in the overall quality level of the events. As too many KPIs would be necessary to benchmark the quality of different integration-stimulating events, which would require too many extra resources, and could decrease the overall robustness of the benchmarking model due to the


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heterogeneity of integration-stimulating events across universities, we have opted to only benchmark the offer and price of these events. When speaking about general services, there are no good values available at present. We will therefore base good values on own experiences and implement feedback of different universities where appropriate. Balanced scorecard. Below, the balanced scorecard is sketched. Table 7 Balanced scorecard (own creation) Activity KPI Internal formalities Timely Correctness Fluency External formalities Offer Fluency Housing Offer Communication Distance Price Integration Offer Price General services Languages Availability Website Budget Staff

Measurement Compare performance to specific deadlines for each formality Number of attempts needed to fulfill the formality correctly Amount of communication needed to fulfil the formality Amount of help offered to fulfil the formality Amount of communication needed to fulfil the formality Accomodation offer Timeliness of communication, completeness of information Distance between accomodation and university compared to other students Rent for accomodation compared to other students Integration-improving events offer Price to participate in the integration-improving event Number of relevant languages spoken by staff Opening hours of staff at host university responsible for exchange students Relevance and up-to-dateness of website Number of employees (in FTE)

Scoring key. We will assess the performance of the different universities taking part in the benchmarking project via giving a score for their performance. The specific scoring modules/keys for the needs of incoming exchange students described before are laid out below. We have developed scoring keys for the different tasks of the international offices. In most cases, when a university has an excellent performance on a specific task or formality, it will receive five points. For a good or average performance, a university receives three points. For a rather weak performance, a university receives one point and for a very bad performance, it will not receive any points at all.


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By adding up the points for the different formalities and tasks, we will be able to sketch the general performance of the university. As some tasks are less complicated or less important, a lower amount of points are awarded for good performances.


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Table 8 Scoring key for the internal formalities (own creation) Timely: Were deadlines respected? Does the university manage to be on time?

Issue of the Letter of Acceptance (Invitation letter) Provision of the up-to-date course catalogue Verification of the Learning Agreement Official matriculation Issue of the students' ID Preparation of the course schedule Establishment of contact with academic responsibles Defining changes to the Learning Agreement Issue of the Transcript of Records

Deadline before mobility before mobility before mobility before 1st lecture before 1st lecture before 1st lecture before 1st lecture 2 weeks after 1st lecture 5 weeks after mobility

++ (5 points) < 2 weeks after application < 2 weeks after application < 4 weeks after application > 1 week before arrival > 1 week before arrival > 1 week before 1st lecture > 1 week before 1st lecture < 10 days after 1st lecture < 4 weeks after mobility

Timely + (3 points) - (1 point) > 4 weeks before mobility < 1 week before mobility > 4 weeks before mobility < 1 week before mobility > 4 weeks before mobility < 1 week before mobility before 1st lecture first week of lectures before 1st lecture first week of lectures before 1st lecture first week of lectures before 1st lecture first week of lectures 2 weeks after 1st lecture < 5 weeks after mobility < 6 weeks after mobility

Correct: How many attempts by the host university were needed to fulfil the formality correctly? Correct Issue of the Letter of Acceptance (Invitation letter) Provision of the up-to-date course catalogue Verification of the Learning Agreement Official matriculation Issue of the students' ID Preparation of the course schedule Establishment contact with academic responsibles Defining changes to the Learning Agreement Issue of the Transcript of Records

++ (5 points) 1 1 1 -

+ (3 points) 1 1 1 1 1

- (1 point) 1 2 2 2 2

-- (0 points) >1 >1 >2 >1 >1 >2 >1 >2 >2

- (1 point) 3 1 4 3 2 3 2 3 2

-- (0 points) >3 >1 >4 >3 >2 >3 >2 >3 >2

Fluent: How much communication between the student and host university was necessary to complete the formality? Fluent Issue of the Letter of Acceptance (Invitation letter) Provision of the up-to-date course catalogue Verification of the Learning Agreement Official matriculation Issue of the students' ID Preparation of the course schedule Establishment of contact with academic responsibles Defining changes to the Learning Agreement Issue of the Transcript of Records

++ (5 points) 1 = 1 week after 1st lecture >= 1 week after 1st lecture >= 1 week after 1st lecture >= 1 week after 1st lecture > 3 weeks after 1st lecture > 6 weeks after mobility


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Table 9 Scoring key for the external formalities (own creation) Offer: Did the university offer help to the students in fulfilling the formality?

Registration at the local register office Enrollment to health insurance Getting a residence permit Opening and closing a bank account

++ (5 points) arranged by host university arranged by host university arranged by host university arranged by host university

Offer + (3 points) - (1 point) >1 way of communication 1 way of communication >1 way of communication 1 way of communication >1 way of communication 1 way of communication >1 way of communication 1 way of communication

-- (0 points) no help no help no help no help

Fluent: How much communication between the student and university was necessary to complete the formality? Fluent Registration at the local register office Enrollment to health insurance Getting a residence permit Opening or closing a bank account

++ (5 points) 1 1 -

+ (3 points) 1 2 2 1

- (1 point) 2 3 3 2

-- (0 points) >2 >3 >3 >2

Table 10 Scoring key for housing (own creation) Offer: Did the students get accommodation by the university or its partner organisations? Communication: Are the accommodation possibilities communicated to the students? Communication: Are the accomodation possibilities communicated to the students in a good way? Distance: What was the distance between the university and the accommodation provided by it compared to regular students' accomodation? Price: How high was the rent in comparison to the regular students' accommodations (of approx. the same quality)?

Score ++ (5 points) + (3 points) - (1 point) > 90% did > 75% did > 50% did < 4 weeks after application < 4 weeks before mobility before mobility full info some things are not clear only most important things > 10% closer < 10% difference < 25% further > 10% cheaper < 10% difference < 25% more expensive

-- (0 points) < 50% did no info no info > 25% further > 25% more expensive


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Table 11 Scoring key for integration (own creation) Offer: What did the university offer to the exchange students to improve their integration? Offer Welcoming service (e.g. pick up at the airport, buddy) Orientation events at the university Language courses on an appropriate level Cultural trips Integration events with the university community

++ (5 points) > 90% of the students > 90% of the students > 90% of the students > 90% of the students > 90% of the students

+ (3 points) > 75% of the students > 75% of the students > 75% of the students > 75% of the students > 75% of the students

- (1 point) > 50% of the students > 50% of the students > 50% of the students > 50% of the students > 50% of the students

-- (0 points) < 50% of the students < 50% of the students < 50% of the students < 50% of the students < 50% of the students

- (1 point) < 75% of cost < 75% of cost < 75% of cost < 75% of cost < 75% of cost

-- (0 points) > 75% of cost > 75% of cost > 75% of cost > 75% of cost > 75% of cost

Price: What was the price exchange students had to pay for taking part in these events? Price Welcoming service (e.g. pick up at the airport, buddy) Orientation events at the university Language courses Cultural trips Integration events with the university community

++ (5 points) free of charge free of charge free of charge free of charge free of charge

+ (3 points) < 50% of cost < 50% of cost < 50% of cost < 50% of cost < 50% of cost

Table 12 Scoring key for general services (own creation)

How many different yet relevant foreign languages are spoken by the international office staff? How often is the administrative staff responsible for exchange students reachable for questions? Does the website of the university provide up to date and relevant information?

++ (5 points) > 75% of foreign students > 30 hours/week yes, in a detailed way

Score + (3 points) - (1 point) > 50% of foreign students < 25% of foreign students > 25 hours/week > 20 hours/week yes, basics are mentioned not fully up to date

-- (0 points) host country language only < 20 hours/week no info


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Table 13 Scoring key for the budget (own creation)

Score How many staff are available for providing services to exchange students (in FTE)? How many international students come to the host university every semester?


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Feedback of different universities. Introduction. After having sketched our own benchmarking model we have now come to one of the most important stages of our benchmarking project. From the literature review we have seen that, in higher education, collaborative benchmarking has become the most suitable methodology over the last 10 years. In order to make sure that our benchmarking model follows this trend, we have therefore implemented a feedback round on our benchmarking model. After having prepared our benchmarking model, we have contacted a number of international offices of partner universities of TH Wildau across Europe to give feedback on our model. We have used the feedback round to both verify the implementability of the benchmarking model in practice at different international offices across regions and countries and the effectiveness of implementing the benchmarking model. The core standardised questions of our feedback round were therefore the following: 1) do you think that comparing the different items of the benchmarking model give insight in the service level for incoming exchange students at your university and 2) do you think it is possible to check the indicators of this benchmarking model in practice at your university. First of all, we have asked the international office of TH Wildau to give feedback on the model. We have also contacted a second German university, the Ruhr West University of Applied Sciences to give their opinion on our work. We have then continued the feedback round by contacting two foreign partner institutions of TH Wildau: the Saint Etienne University Institute of Technology in France and the Vives South University College in Belgium.


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Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau, Germany. At TH Wildau, we have spoken to Mr. Ingo-Eric Schmidt-Braul, CEO and founder of IBA_knowledge networks, an affiliated institute of TH Wildau, which develops and executes programmes related to international student exchanges in cooperation with DAAD. Although Mr. Schmidt-Braul is convinced that the set of KPIs we have developed is relevant for benchmarking service levels of international offices, he underlines that the specific needs and priorities of the international students should not be left out of the benchmarking model. However, in the literature review, we stated that “we will [… have to] use a more pragmatic approach when implementing the priorities of exchange students in the benchmarking model” (p. 39). After the discussion with Mr. Schmidt-Braul, we have therefore chosen to implement the priorities of the international students in a specific way, so that both the good practices which were identified by benchmarking the services of different universities and the reaction of the international offices on the priorities of exchange students remain visible. We will ask the foreign students to tell us which of the three groups of tasks of the international office they find more important: help with external formalities, housing or integration. In a next stage, we can then compare the benchmarking score of the international office with these priorities of the students. Ruhr West University of Applied Sciences, Germany. At Ruhr West University of Applied Sciences, we have spoken to Ms. Christiane Hinrichs, the head of the international office of the university. Although Ms. Hinrichs is very enthusiastic about the project because it matches with current trends regarding quality control at universities, she is not sure whether it would be a good idea to implement the benchmarking


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model at her university because the university was only founded in 2009: “we are still in the process of developing our international network. Our incoming numbers are still so very small that they would not provide an objective result” (Hinrichs, 2014). Just like we pointed out before, Ms Hinrichs says that “the result does not rely on the performance of the host university only. It depends very much on the individual incoming student or partner university” (Hinrichs, 2014). Unfortunately, there is no feasible solution for this issue. Like we said in the introduction of this thesis, we will have to take into account cultural differences when analysing the outcomes of this benchmarking project. If a university focuses on exchanges with certain countries or cultures, it could in deed be true that these cultural differences have an impact on the outcome of the benchmarking study. If University A mostly cooperates with African countries, and University B mostly with Northern American countries, we will, for example, have to take into account the different perception of time (monochromic or polychromic) between these universities when analysing the outcomes of the benchmarking study. It is also important to keep in mind that the goal of this benchmarking study is not to simply compare numbers and rank universities according to their performance, but to identify good practices. The reason why an international office scores well is therefore of key importance to identify these good practices and improve the overall performance of international offices. A last comment of Ms. Hinrichs is that “international offices might not be involved in certain aspects of the incoming process at the host institution, depending on the way the ERASMUS programme is implemented between international office and faculties. For example, the new ERASMUS Learning Agreement does not require the signature of the international office anymore” (Hinrichs, 2014). However, as we said before, the international office usually


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remains responsible for developing and implementing the internationalisation strategy of the university and should thus be able to sketch the university’s situation. Moreover, as we have opted to implement a collaborative benchmarking methodology, the different international offices will be responsible for carrying out the specific scoring activities at their institutions (van Vught et al., 2010, pp. 96-99). They will thus be able to ask for assistance of other staff within the university in case the international office itself does not carry out the specific activity. Saint Etienne University Institute of Technology, France. We have contacted Ms. Evelyne Downs, academic responsible for the international students at the Saint Etienne University Institute of Technology in France to give her opinion on our benchmarking model. Although the institution has only become a partner of TH Wildau recently, it has extensive experience with international students. Ms. Downs is especially interested in the study and thinks it will provide interesting feedback. Just like Ms. Hinrichs of the Ruhr West University of Applied Sciences, however, she thinks that “[benchmarking] the amount of communication or the time needed to fulfil papers vary because of students responses” (Hinrichs, 2014). This again is a proof of the importance of interpreting the outcomes of the benchmarking study. As a second point, Ms. Downs tells us that at the Saint Etienne University Institute of Technology, difficulties with Learning Agreements arise because course catalogues are not always up to date or are not very clear. “Some students can take a while to understand how the host university system works. In that case, both parties have a role to play” (Hinrichs, 2014). This last point, however, is not a direct critique on the benchmarking model we developed, but is a reason why the institute would have a rather low score on the internal formality ‘verification of the Learning Agreement’. However, it is correct that with the internal formality ‘provision of the


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course catalogue’, we should make sure this catalogue is up to date and understandable. We have therefore changed the name of that indicator to ‘provision of the up-to-date course catalogue’. To end her feedback on the benchmarking model, Ms. Downs suggests including a ratio that compares staff with the amount of exchange students. As this ratio gives a good insight in the productivity of staff at international offices, will calculate and discuss it in the ‘budget’section of our benchmarking model. Vives South University College, Belgium. At Vives South University College, we have spoken to Mr. Johan Cottyn, the international coordinator of the department of Commercial Sciences and Business Management in Kortrijk, Belgium. Mr. Cottyn thinks the benchmarking model can be implemented at international offices in different countries, but after sketching the situation in Kortrijk, we can underline that we must not forget that at universities in countries with a language that does not belong to the main European languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Italian), the exchange students do usually not follow courses with the regular full-time students at the university due to the language barrier. Although in se this does not change the tasks of the international office at the host university (except that here, the international office also has to organise the lectures which are specifically organised for the exchange students), the scores of the international office for the benchmarking model are likely to be different on some elements (e.g. the Transcripts of Records can probably be issued easier as the professors only have to deal with grades of exchange students, and only has one contact person for the entire administration of his course).


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The benchmarking model can however be implemented and scores can be determined for all of the KPIs, but one must bear in mind that this does not mean that good practices can be exchanged and implemented in a direct way. Conclusion. Although most of our interviewees have given us some food for thought and some views on how we should interpret the outcomes of grading universities via the benchmarking model, none of them has doubted the implementability or effectiveness of the model we have developed. However, all of the people we have interviewed underline that the correct interpretation of the data is of key importance to give advice on how to improve services for exchange students. We will keep this in mind when discussing the outcomes of our study. We have also learnt that it would be valuable to implement the priorities of the incoming exchange students in our benchmarking model, which would add a different dimension to our study (as we would be able to see how good the international office responds to these priorities), and we have also obtained the idea to calculate a ratio of the number of students in comparison to the number of staff at the international office. We will implement both ideas in our work. Priorities of students. Although the needs of the exchange students are similar across countries, the priority of the needs can be different according to the country of origin of the student. In order to identify the priorities of these incoming exchange students, we will therefore ask the different students how important they find the following tasks of the international office: a) help to fulfil external formalities, b) help with housing/accommodation, c) organisation of integration-stimulating events.


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We will also ask the students to tell us how important they find it to get help when completing the following external formalities: a) help with the registration at the local register office, b) help with the enrolment to the local health insurance, c) help to obtain a residence permit, d) help to open and close a bank account. Then, the students will be asked to tell us how important they find the following accommodation-related factors: a) provision of accommodation to foreign students by the host university, b) communication of accommodation possibilities in the region, c) distance from the dormitory to the university, d) price (rent) of the accommodation. To finish the survey, we will ask the incoming exchange students to tell us how important they find the following integration-stimulating events: a) welcoming service, b) orientation events at the university, c) language courses, d) cultural trips, e) integration events with the university community. For each of the four groups, we will ask the students to tell us how important they find the specific activities by giving them a score between 0 (not important for me) to 100 (very important for me). Unlike asking the students to simply rank the different tasks, obtaining a score between 0 and 100 for every activity gives us the possibility to make calculations based on the


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scores. Although it is correct to say that the scores given by the exchange students are just an indication expressed in digits, and should definitely be interpreted, their use is twofold: we can both use them to rank the priorities of the group of exchange students at the host university, and also compare the performance of the international office with the priorities of the exchange students so that the need for change becomes visible. One will see, however, that internal formalities are not questioned in the survey. The reason for this is that this would not provide useable feedback and insights in the results of the scoring of the KPIs. Even if the exchange students would not find help with internal formalities important, the host university still needs to complete them, and it is beneficial if these tasks can be completed as efficiently and effectively as possible. As the host university is, next to the exchange student, the only party that is involved in the completion of the internal formalities, it can improve its service for completing these formalities by itself in a rather fast way. The efficient and effective completion of these internal formalities will then give the international office the possibility to use the saved time and resources on the improvement of the other activities of the international office. After having obtained both the score of the international office for the specific KPIs and the priorities of the exchange students, we now have the opportunity to compare both scores and check how good the international office responds to the priorities of the exchange students. We will do this by dividing the scores for the KPIs with the priorities of the exchange students. The following table shows the possible outcomes:


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Table 14 Possible outcomes when dividing scores through priorities (own creation) S/P high score high priority +/- 100% low priority > 100% Score < 100% +/- 100% > 100%

low score < 100% +/- 100%

Meaning the priorities of the students are not fulfilled, the international office should drastically improve its service the priorities of the students are fulfilled, the service offer meets the demand of the exchange students the service of the international office is better then what the students ask for

A value that is manifestly lower than one hundred per cent means that the priorities of the students are not fulfilled and that the international office should drastically improve its service. A value of about one hundred per cent means that the needs of the students are fulfilled and that the service offer meets the demand of the exchanges students. A score that is clearly higher than one hundred per cent means that the service of the international office is better than what the students ask for. Via carrying out this calculation, we will be able to identify the performance of the international office in relation to the priorities of exchange students, and we will be able to identify the need for change at the international office in an easier way. However, as both the scores of the international office for the different KPIs and the priorities of the exchange students are expressed in figures, we should not forget to bear in mind the underlying meaning of these scores when carrying out this calculation and drawing conclusions based on it. To make sure the exact score of the international office is not directly considered, we have ranked the performance of the international office for the different tasks from 1 (excellent service) to 5 (this should definitely be improved). Conclusion. We have now identified the tasks of the international offices when welcoming exchange students, developed our benchmarking model and retrieved good practices from the available


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literature. We have also asked several partner institutions of TH Wildau to give us feedback on our benchmarking model, and implemented that feedback where we found it appropriate. We have also sketched a framework in which priorities of students can be taken into account. The benchmarking model focuses on four tasks of the international office, where for each main task, we have retrieved several sub-tasks and KPIs who are appropriate to measure the performance of the international office. Next to this, we will also benchmark a certain amount of more general KPIs which give insight in the outcomes of the task-oriented benchmarking project. From the feedback round, we have seen that the priorities of exchange students should not be ignored. Although we have learned from the literature review that implementing the priorities of students in the benchmarking model requires a certain level of pragmatism, we have decided to ask the exchange students to inform us about their priorities when going abroad, so that the importance of the different tasks of the international office can be taken into account and the need for change made more concrete. Implementation of the model Introduction. After having developed the benchmarking model theoretically, we have now come to the last stage of the study in which we will implement the model. We will start by introducing the participants in the study, and will then continue by gathering and reporting the data needed for our project. Once we have completed this step, we will then develop an action plan to introduce change. Although the other international office participating in the study will not be forgotten, we will mainly focus on the international office of TH Wildau, as this international office works in an environment we know best. Therefore, tips and strategies can be more concrete. We will


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end by giving concrete ideas on how to monitor and follow-up the action plan that was developed within this project. Participants. We will mainly focus on the implementation of the benchmarking model at TH Wildau, as this is the international office the author of this work is most familiar with. We will describe all steps we undertook to carry out the benchmarking study in a detailed way so that other interested institutions can build upon our work and in the end services for incoming exchange students can improve. The other institution that will provide us with their data is the Vives South University College in Belgium. We will carry out the entire benchmarking process at TH Wildau first, so that our partner has a clear idea about how we developed the scores. Then, the benchmarking partner will provide us with their data so that we can prepare an overview of the scores of both institutions. In a later stage, we will then develop recommendations for both benchmarking partners. It is clear that the recommendations for TH Wildau will be more precise due to the fact that the author of this work is more familiar with the institution. However, Vives South University College will also obtain recommendations where possible. Data gathering and reporting. Introduction. In the following part, we will gather and report the data needed to identify good practices across international offices. We will start by gathering data at TH Wildau, as here we will be the sole responsible for the task. We will firstly describe the methodology we used to obtain the data, so that other institutions can build upon our work, and afterwards describe the results of carrying out scoring activities at TH Wildau.


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In a next stage, we will ask our partner institution to provide us with its outcomes. Afterwards, we will develop an overview so that the results of the scoring activities across the different institutions become visible and differences can be identified easily. This will help up to identify good practices. Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau, Germany. Methodology. Introduction. We will now describe the methodology we used to obtain the data needed to carry out our benchmarking study. As we also wanted to include the priorities of the exchange students in our benchmarking model, we will also describe the method we used to obtain the necessary data to identify the priorities of the exchange students at TH Wildau. We have chosen to work with the most recent data available from TH Wildau, as this will give us the opportunity to give advice to the international office on how to change procedures in the most optimal way. If we would have worked with older data, it could be that procedures have already changed, and that our advice becomes irrelevant and out-dated. We will therefore use data from summer semester 2014 (from March till July 2014) to evaluate the performance of the international office. During that semester, 34 students who can be identified as exchange students according to our definition (see chapter 1) came to TH Wildau under the responsibility of the international office. Scoring the KPIs. As only a relatively small group of exchange students studied in Wildau during summer semester 2014, we have chosen to not select a sample, but evaluate the KPIs we developed for each of the exchange students. A different option could have been to evaluate the performance


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by ourselves without evaluating the KPIs for all students. However, as we are both judging and being judged in this case, we have tried to score the performance of TH Wildau on objective data we can retrieve (e.g. official matriculation day, dates of e-mails, …) at the international office so that no clear conflicts of interests can arise. Where data was not available, we have asked the staff at the international office to inform us about how they carried out certain tasks. As we use data from summer semester 2014, the feedback of these employees can still be detailed and very useful for our study. To check the timeliness of the internal formalities, we have compared the performance of the international office with the deadlines that were set in our benchmarking model. Here, we have obtained the data on which the different formalities were carried out by going through the specific files of the exchange students and the e-mail conversations between these students and the staff of the international office. To assess the number of attempts that were necessary to complete the formalities, we have checked the version numbers of the documents where possible (Letter of Acceptance, Learning Agreement, official matriculation, changes to Learning Agreement and Transcript of Records). Where an indication of different versions was not available, we have based our assessment on the testimonials of the international office staff. To check how fluent internal formalities were completed, we have checked the e-mail correspondence between the staff of the international office and the exchange students and have also asked the international office staff to tell us how the communication went with the different students. In order to measure the performance of the international office when helping exchange students with external formalities, we have checked both service offer and fluency. For each student, we have checked if the international office helped to fulfil the formality via going


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through the list of the international office with the data of the incoming exchange students. This list contains several fields in which information is stored regarding external formalities: does the student need to fulfil this requirement, has it been completed, … Like this, the international office can track if the students have completed all formalities. Where no useful information was required, we have contacted the staff of the international office. The same goes for the assessment of the amount of communication needed to fulfil the formality, although here, information from e-mail conversations has been used too provide insight in the fluency of the completion of the different external formalities. To assess the housing situation of the exchange students, we have based our evaluation on the list of the international office with the data of the exchange students, as this list also contains information on the residence of the different students. In order to check the communication of the accommodation possibilities, we have assessed the welcoming e-mail used by the international office to welcome future incoming exchange students. To calculate values for the KPIs on price and distance of the dormitory, we have based ourselves on the different dormitories provided by the students union in the area (Hochschulring (0 km from the university, 270 EUR rent per month), Birkenallee (1,9 km from the university, 210 EUR rent per month) and Schillerallee (2,2 km from the university, on average 210 EUR rent per month)). The average rent and distance from the university of these three residences have been used as benchmark. When assessing the scores of other universities, however, a different benchmark might need to be developed and used. To check the performance of the international office of TH Wildau regarding integrationstimulating events, we have reviewed the communication about the different activities organised by the international office, such as e-mails and programmes. These usually contain the price of


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the event and, via reviewing which groups of students were invited to these events; insight could be given on the offer, too. To measure both general services and budget, we have based ourselves on information that is publicly available or was provided by the international office staff. Retrieving the priorities of exchange students. To measure the priorities of the exchange students at TH Wildau, we have sent out a survey to the exchange students we also used to assess the performance of the international office. From the 34 exchange students, 26 have completed the survey. Although we have spent a lot of effort, not the entire population of exchange students has answered our questionnaire. However, when checking for representation of the different groups of exchange students (different cultural background, study level and study programme), we can say that all groups are represented in the outcomes of the survey. Via using an online platform to carry out our survey, we were able to monitor the answers of the different students according to the e-mail address that was used to send out the invitation to fill out the survey. Because of using this tool, we have been able to ignore the answers of students originating from EU countries on the questions which are only targeted towards non-EU students (help with the enrolment to local health insurance and help to obtain a residence permit: students who have the nationality of an EU member state do not need to fulfil these formalities), and were able to keep track of the students’ background. For each of the four groups, we have asked the students to tell us how important they find the specific activities by giving them a score between 0 (not important for me) to 100 (very important for me), by sliding a bar from the left (0) to the right (100), so that the students can see


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how they score the different activities and make their proportions are clear and priorities are made visible. Outcomes. After having obtained all data needed to complete our benchmarking model and having retrieved the priorities of exchange students at TH Wildau, we have developed an overview of the scores of the university’s international office. Once this overview was prepared, we then have identified good practices of the international office of TH Wildau. Below, the overview of the scores can be found and good practices have been listed for each group of activities of the international office. Table 15 Timeliness of the completion of internal formalities at TH Wildau (own creation)

Objective score Grade Max. % Issue of the Letter of Acceptance (Invitation letter) 3,00 5,00 60% Provision of the up-to-date course catalogue 4,11 5,00 82% Verification of the Learning Agreement 3,30 5,00 66% Official matriculation 5,00 5,00 100% Issue of the students' ID 3,71 5,00 74% Preparation of the course schedule 3,00 5,00 60% Establishment of contact with academic responsibles 2,94 5,00 59% Defining changes to the Learning Agreement 3,13 5,00 63% Issue of the Transcript of Records 2,33 5,00 47% Total 30,51 45,00 68% a) immediately after the student was accepted to study at TH Wildau, he is provided with a link to the module descriptions of the courses he can choose from in the welcoming email. b) the student is asked to forward us a passport picture, a filled-out contact form and a copy of his ID card so that the matriculation can be done in advance.


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c) once the student is matriculated, the students' ID can usually be issued automatically. Only in case the student is not staying the entire semester, this has to be cleared out so that the student only pays a part of the fees for the public transport ticket. d) for groups of students that follow the same programme at the host university, a meeting with the programme director is organised before the first lecture. Table 16 Correctness of the completion of internal formalities at TH Wildau (own creation)

Objective score Grade Max. % Issue of the Letter of Acceptance (Invitation letter) 2,88 3,00 96% Provision of the up-to-date course catalogue 1,00 1,00 100% Verification of the Learning Agreement 3,96 5,00 79% Official matriculation 2,82 3,00 94% Issue of the students' ID 2,56 3,00 85% Preparation of the course schedule 3,83 5,00 77% Establishment of contact with academic responsibles 2,91 3,00 97% Defining changes to the Learning Agreement 4,00 5,00 80% Issue of the Transcript of Records 2,80 3,00 93% Total 26,77 31,00 86% a) the international office only issues documents based on valid identity documents. b) students have appointments with staff of the international office so that formalities can be carried with the student. c) the international office prefers to wait until full information becomes available before it acts.


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Table 17 Fluency of the completion of internal formalities at TH Wildau (own creation)

Objective score Grade Max. % Issue of the Letter of Acceptance (Invitation letter) 4,88 5,00 98% Provision of the up-to-date course catalogue 1,00 1,00 100% Verification of the Learning Agreement 3,96 5,00 79% Official matriculation 4,59 5,00 92% Issue of the students' ID 2,65 3,00 88% Preparation of the course schedule 4,25 5,00 85% Establishment of contact with academic responsibles 2,76 3,00 92% Defining changes to the Learning Agreement 3,83 5,00 77% Issue of the Transcript of Records 2,23 3,00 74% Total 30,15 35,00 86% a) the international office issues FAQs to guide the students through the administrative formalities. b) the international office carries out most of the tasks on its own initiative. c) where possible, students are helped in their mother tongue by the international office. Table 18 Assistance offer for external formalities at TH Wildau (own creation)

Registration at the local register office Enrollment to health insurance Getting a residence permit Opening and closing a bank account Total

Objective score Grade Max. % 4,60 5,00 92% 5,00 5,00 100% 4,73 5,00 95% 0,24 5,00 5% 14,57 20,00 73%

Students' view Imp. Rank 79% 2 74% 3 80% 1 50% 4 72% 3

Score/View % Rank 116% 3 136% 1 118% 2 9% 4 101% 2

a) the international office helps students with all formalities except for the opening and closing of a bank account. b) the international office maintains good contacts with local agencies responsible for the external formalities.


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c) the university has a special partnership with a health insurance company, which has consultation time on the campus one day a week. Table 19 Fluency of the completion of external formalities at TH Wildau (own creation)



Students' view Imp. Rank 79% 2 74% 3 80% 1 50% 4 72% 3

Score/View % Rank 110% 3 112% 2 98% 1 167% 4 115% 1

a) the international office issues FAQs to guide the students through the administrative formalities. b) the international office carries out most of the tasks on its own initiative. c) where possible, students are helped in their mother tongue by the international office. Table 20 Housing at TH Wildau (own creation)

Offer: Direct provision of accomodation Communication: Communication of possibilities Communication: Way to communicate possibilities Distance: Distance between the university and the accommodation Price: How high was the rent Total

Objective score Grade Max. % 5,00 5,00 100% 4,82 5,00 96% 3,71 5,00 74% 1,66 5,00 33% 1,93 5,00 39% 17,12 25,00 68%

Students' view Imp. Rank 74% 4 76% 2 76% 2 74% 3 87% 1 84% 1

Score/View % Rank 135% 1 127% 2 98% 3 44% 5 45% 4 81% 4

a) the international office manages a number of dormitories by itself, so that it can make sure all exchange students get a place to live. b) the international office maintains good contacts with other organisations offering accommodation to students. c) the international office issues FAQs to guide students through the application procedure.


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Table 21 Offer of integration-supporting activities at TH Wildau (own creation)

Welcoming service (e.g. pick up at the airport, buddy) Orientation events at the university Language courses on an appropriate level Cultural trips Integration events with the university community Total



Score/View % Rank 78% 3 81% 2 76% 5 123% 1 77% 4 85% 3

a) the international office organises an orientation week for foreign students, orientation events at the university, language courses, cultural trips and integration events with the university community. b) the schedules of the language courses are prepared together with the students so that a maximum of students can participate. Table 22 Price of integration-supporting activities at TH Wildau (own creation)




Score/View % Rank 130% 2 136% 1 127% 4 74% 5 128% 3 115% 1

a) the university funds most of the integration-stimulating events. b) only for cultural trips, exchange students are asked to pay a part of the price of the event. Table 23 General services of the international office of TH Wildau (own creation)

Foreign languages are spoken by international office Reachability for questions Relevance and up-to-dateness of website Total a) language competences are of key importance when hiring staff.

Grade Max. % 5,00 5,00 100% 5,00 5,00 100% 1,00 5,00 20% 11,00 15,00 73%


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b) the international office does never work behind closed doors; most of the time students can hop in if they need assistance. Table 24 Budget of the international office of TH Wildau (own creation) How many staff are available for providing services to exchange students (in FTE)? How many exchange students come to the host university every semester? How many students does every employee of the international office support?

Grade 1,00 34 34

We have now completed our survey at TH Wildau. Below, an overview of the performance of the international office of TH Wildau is provided. We see that the international office has obtained a score of 76% based on the objective scoring of the KPIs. In particular, the university is foot at providing integration-stimulating events and helping students with internal and external formalities. It should put more effort on helping students with accommodationrelated issues. The exchange students at TH Wildau also find in finding accommodation the number one priority of the international office. Table 25 Overview of the performance of the international office of TH Wildau (own creation)

Internal formalities External formalities Housing Integration General services Total


Students' view Imp. Rank 72% 3 84% 1 80% 2 80% -

Score/View % Rank 108% 1 81% 3 100% 2 94% -

Vives South University College, Belgium. Methodology. After having completed our study at TH Wildau, we have sent out the scores of TH Wildau together with the scoring key to the Vives South University College in Belgium. We have received feedback on the model we have developed via e-mail. Mr. Johan Cottyn, the


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international coordinator of the department of Commercial Sciences and Business Management has provided us with the necessary information so that we can score the different KPIs. Although the information we have obtained from (Cottyn, 2014) is sufficient to sketch the performance of the international office at Vives’ department of Commercial Sciences and Business Management, the scores of Vives are not determined directly by us via the direct investigation of the individual files of the incoming exchange students. Therefore, we have opted to not create scores with decimals. However, the scores for Vives are sufficient to get a clear overview of the performance of the international office of the department of Commercial Sciences and Business Management of the Vives South University College. Outcomes. Table 26 Timeliness of the completion of internal formalities at Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014))

Objective score Grade Max. % Issue of the Letter of Acceptance (Invitation letter) 3,00 5,00 60% Provision of the up-to-date course catalogue 3,00 5,00 60% Verification of the Learning Agreement 4,00 5,00 80% Official matriculation 3,00 5,00 60% Issue of the students' ID 5,00 5,00 100% Preparation of the course schedule 5,00 5,00 100% Establishment of contact with academic responsibles 4,00 5,00 80% Defining changes to the Learning Agreement 4,00 5,00 80% Issue of the Transcript of Records 5,00 5,00 100% Total 36,00 45,00 80% a) the university prepares all course schedules before the start of the lectures. The university manages to reduce the number of conflicts in the course schedules because the


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international students follow specific courses that are only available for the international students. b) the contact with all academic responsibles is organised during one event before the start of the lectures. c) the course catalogue for the exchange students is updated on a regular basis and published on the website of the university. Table 27 Correctness of the completion of internal formalities at Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014))

Objective score Grade Max. % Issue of the Letter of Acceptance (Invitation letter) 3,00 3,00 100% Provision of the up-to-date course catalogue 1,00 1,00 100% Verification of the Learning Agreement 4,00 5,00 80% Official matriculation 2,00 3,00 67% Issue of the students' ID 3,00 3,00 100% Preparation of the course schedule 4,00 5,00 80% Establishment of contact with academic responsibles 3,00 3,00 100% Defining changes to the Learning Agreement 4,00 5,00 80% Issue of the Transcript of Records 3,00 3,00 100% Total 27,00 31,00 87% a) the international office develops data based on the information it receives from the exchange students. The exchange students fill out the needed information in an online database. b) changes to the Learning Agreement are rather easy to figure out as the exchange students can only take courses from a specific list of courses available to them (as full time students take lectures in Dutch, there is an extra programme in English). The international office makes sure these lectures do not take place at the same moment.


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Table 28 Fluency of the completion of internal formalities at Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014))

Objective score Grade Max. % Issue of the Letter of Acceptance (Invitation letter) 5,00 5,00 100% Provision of the up-to-date course catalogue 1,00 1,00 100% Verification of the Learning Agreement 5,00 5,00 100% Official matriculation 4,00 5,00 80% Issue of the students' ID 3,00 3,00 100% Preparation of the course schedule 4,00 5,00 80% Establishment of contact with academic responsibles 3,00 3,00 100% Defining changes to the Learning Agreement 4,00 5,00 80% Issue of the Transcript of Records 2,00 3,00 67% Total 31,00 35,00 89% a) the international office develops data based on the information it receives from the exchange students. The exchange students fill out the needed information in an online database. Table 29 Assistance offer for external formalities at Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014))



a) the international office offers individual support for the registration at the local register office and the residence permit. b) the international office provides all necessary information on how to enrol to health insurance. It is up to the exchange student to fulfil the formality.


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c) it is up to the exchange students to decide whether to open a bank account or not. Table 30 Fluency of the completion of external formalities at Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014))



a) where possible, incoming students are helped in their mother tongue by the international office. Table 31 Housing at Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014))

Offer: Direct provision of accomodation Communication: Communication of possibilities Communication: Way to communicate possibilities Distance: Distance between the university and the accommodation Price: How high was the rent Total


a) the university has hired a housing officer, which is fully responsible of housing all exchange students in a good way. The housing officer is also responsible for preparing and where necessary checking the rental contracts of the exchange students. b) the exchange students can find all necessary information on the available dormitories on the website of the university.


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Table 32 Offer of integration-supporting activities at Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014))



a) all students are picked up at the airport personally. b) the university organises a welcoming day with a barbecue where all exchange students are welcomed in an official way. c) just half of the students follow Dutch language courses due to the limited usability of the language. d) the international office organises several cultural trips to different cities. e) the university organises an international lunch where the regular full-time students can get some insight in the cultures of the exchange students. Table 33 Price of integration-supporting activities at Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014))



a) only cultural trips are partly financed by the exchange student.


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Table 34 General services of the international office of Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014)) Foreign languages are spoken by international office Reachability for questions Relevance and up-to-dateness of website Total

Grade Max. % 5,00 5,00 100% 5,00 5,00 100% 4,00 5,00 80% 14,00 15,00 93%

a) the international office hires interns which can do an internship under the conditions of the Erasmus+ programme. b) the study programme is monitored, and the course programme updated on a frequent basis. Table 35 Budget of the international office of Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014)) How many staff are available for providing services to exchange students (in FTE)? How many exchange students come to the host university every semester? How many students does every employee of the international office support?

Grade 2,50 60 24

Table 36 Overview of the performance of the international office of Vives (own creation, based on (Cottyn, 2014))

Internal formalities External formalities Housing Integration General services Total



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Overview. Table 37 Comparison of the benchmarking scores of TH Wildau and Vives (own creation)

Internal formalities - Timeliness - Correctness - Fluency External formalities - Offer - Fluency Housing Integration - Offer - Price General services Total Number of students per employee (FTE)

TH Wildau Grade Max. % 87,43 111,00 79% 30,51 45,00 68% 26,77 31,00 86% 30,15 35,00 86% 27,73 36,00 77% 14,57 20,00 73% 13,16 16,00 82% 17,12 25,00 68% 40,00 50,00 80% 17,00 25,00 68% 23,00 25,00 92% 11,00 15,00 73% 183,28 237,00 76% 34,00

Grade 94,00 36,00 27,00 31,00 25,00 13,00 12,00 22,00 41,00 18,00 23,00 14,00 196,00

Vives Max. 111,00 45,00 31,00 35,00 36,00 20,00 16,00 25,00 50,00 25,00 25,00 15,00 237,00

% 85% 80% 87% 89% 69% 65% 75% 88% 82% 72% 92% 93% 83%

24,00

When comparing the scores of both TH Wildau and Vives, we see that overall, Vives scores better than TH Wildau. This is mainly due to the better performance on the KPIs related to the housing for exchange students, where Vives scores about 20 per cent higher than TH Wildau. We also see that Vives scores better on general services. This is mainly because the website of Vives is more up-to- date, and follows a better understandable structure. Where we see that TH Wildau scores better on both the provision and fluency of the completion of external formalities, Vives scores better on meeting deadlines of internal formalities. The international office of the department of Commercial Sciences and Business Management of Vives has more employees to support the incoming exchange students. Although there also is a central international office for the entire university, the international office at the specific department stays responsible for most of the direct needs of the exchange students. Both


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the full-time employees at the international office of the department and the employees at the central international office are responsible for the strategic tasks of the international office. At TH Wildau, we see a more egalitarian approach with a much lower number of interns who are responsible for the day-to-day issues of international students. Action plan to introduce change. Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau, Germany. It stands no doubt that the offer of integration-stimulating events and activities at TH Wildau is excellent. At the same time, the personal financial contribution of the students is limited. As having to pay to take part in these events could be a barrier for students to integrate at the host university, the university performs excellent overall on this section. However, we must make sure that the quality of the specific integration-stimulating events is high. As the characteristics of specific integration-stimulating events differ across universities, mainly due to differences in numbers of incoming exchange students, this requires further individual monitoring at the specific institution. The international office of TH Wildau also performs excellently in terms of help with external formalities. Both the support offer and the fluency of the completion of the formalities are excellent. Another strength of the international office is that it helps more than 75 per cent of the incoming exchange students in the students’ native language. This is definitely a reason why the fluency of completion of both internal and external formalities is excellent at TH Wildau. The university does an excellent job in keeping in mind language skills in hiring staff for its international office. When reviewing how internal formalities are completed at TH Wildau, we see that the international office performs excellently overall. Only minor improvements are necessary, and


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these should be focused on meeting deadlines better. The best example of this is the issue of the Transcripts of Records of the exchange students: although the international office of TH Wildau issues the documents correctly, and rather few communication between the exchange students and the international office is required, the university does not really manage to send out the Transcripts of Records on time. The university should therefore change its processes, so that information becomes available earlier for the international office and that the formality can be completed on time. Looking closer at the process, we see that every individual exchange student has to hand in a document to each of his professors where the professor should then fill out the grade of the student for the specific course. It is clear that this information flow from the professors towards the international office should be streamlined. This is a key priority for TH Wildau, as the number of exchange students keeps growing and the issue thus becomes more and more visible. As the international office of TH Wildau has all information on the courses the different exchange students are taking (the information is in the Learning Agreements of the students), a possible solution would be for the international office to issue lists with all students taking a specific course and send out these list to the specific professor holding the course. Like this, less communication between the students and the international office would be necessary and the probability that deadlines would be respected would increase as there are only two parties involved who can influence the outcome of the process of issuing the Transcript of Records: the international office and the professor lecturing the specific module. Due to the fact that the responsibility of the different parties would increase as there is no third party (the exchange student himself) involved anymore, and that the professor automatically gets a clear overview of the international students attending his lectures when


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grading lists are sent out, which makes it less probable for the professor to forget forwarding one of the grades to the international office, it is likely that the situation would improve at TH Wildau. The international office of TH Wildau must however make sure it always has the most up-to-date information on the Learning Agreements of the exchange students in order to implement this process successfully. Unfortunately, here we cannot directly implement a good practice from Vives South University College, as at this university the exchange students do not take lectures with the regular Belgian students because the lectures of the regular full-time students are taught in Dutch and the specific modules for the exchange students are taught in English. However, the university also uses grading lists for the exchange students to communicate the grades from the academic staff to the international office. A possible solution for the international office to make sure it is informed about the exact Learning Agreement of the exchange students could be to set tighter deadlines to the exchange students if they want to make changes to their Learning Agreements, and explicitly ask the exchange students if they want to make changes to their Learning Agreements, as we have said before. When carrying out comparing the performance on housing at TH Wildau and Vives, we can see that the score of TH Wildau is much lower than the one of Vives. Here, the main issue is the rent and distance from the university of the dormitories for international students. This, however, is a result of the provision of accommodation by the international office itself. Due to the fact that the accommodation offer in the surroundings of the university is limited and has not grown while the demand has risen together with the development of the university, rents have risen. To compensate this, the university has searched for accommodation possibilities that are


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located a bit further away from the university. It is clear, however, that initiatives (both private and public) should be taken to stabilise the accommodation situation at TH Wildau. The international office could also continue its efforts in providing students with an overview of the accommodation possibilities in the region, and could build partnerships with landlords in the region so that in the future, they can help students. It is visible that the website of the international office at TH Wildau is out-dated. Most of the information and forms available on the website are at least 3 years old, and the structure of the website is not consequently organised towards providing information to exchange students. It is therefore impossible for the incoming exchange students at TH Wildau to find correct information on the website of their host university. Looking at the international office of other universities, we see that the information for the international students is better concentrated: on the website of Vives, for example, links to the course schedules, information on accommodation possibilities and contact information are centralized on one, well-structured homepage. This good practice could be implemented at TH Wildau. We see that at Vives, the international office has uses interns (at present, the international office has 2 interns, amounting up to 1 FTE) to support the international offices’ operations. This has a clear positive influence on the ratio number of staff/exchange students at Vives, and makes it possible for the full-time employees to focus on tasks with a more strategic importance. One of these key tasks is guaranteeing the provision of good quality housing for the incoming exchange students. By appointing a housing officer at the central international office of all of the Vives departments, the university has been able to guarantee good housing for its incoming students via developing relationships with landlords in the region, checking rental


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contracts and living conditions of exchange students, operating own halls of residences and initiating new projects regarding student housing. It could be a good idea for TH Wildau to also appoint a housing officer who becomes responsible for these issues as, according to our benchmarking study, the housing issue for exchange students and international students in general at TH Wildau is precarious. Hiring interns for the more operational tasks of the international office could be a good solution to give the full-time employees more time to spend on these strategic issues. Due to the fact that building and maintaining the website of the international office also is a task which requires more in-depth knowledge of the content management system behind the website and a more long-term approach, this could also be a task which could be distributed to the full time employees of the international office. What we can also learn from Vives is that a centralized approach (managing formalities with a bigger group of exchange students at the same time) makes it easier to meet certain deadlines and improves efficiency. Rather then allowing new students on a rolling basis, the international office of TH Wildau should set strict deadlines for the application of exchange students and should also require international students to hand in the necessary application documents on time. This would give the international office the opportunity to use economies of scale and scope. At Vives, the application deadline for the summer semester, for example, is 20 November. At TH Wildau, there is no defined application deadline at present. The international office of TH Wildau could therefore use the deadline of Vives as a starting point to develop its own deadlines. To conclude, we can say that the following ideas should be concretized and implemented on the short term (before next semester begins):


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a) implementation and follow up of strict deadlines on the application of incoming students; b) centralization of the grades communication process from the different professors to the international office via excluding influences from exchange students in the process; c) updating and restructuring the website of the international office. The following issues should be addressed on the mid-term: a) redistribution of tasks so that the full-time employees focus more on strategically important issues; b) hiring interns to deal with issues who are closer to the incoming students; c) improvement of housing facilities for the exchange students. Vives South University College, Belgium. Due to the fact that Vives has extensive international experience, we see that overall the service level for exchange students is outstanding. When comparing with TH Wildau, we see that Vives could improve its service for the external formalities. Here, we see that TH Wildau has built a partnership with a German public health insurance fund, which makes it performing better than Vives on the KPIs linked to the enrolment at a health insurance. Vives could try to implement a similar initiative. However, it is recommended that the international office of Vives first asks its exchange students whether they are interested in more support when completing external formalities. This could be done by carrying out a study to identify the priorities of exchange students like we have been doing for TH Wildau. Monitoring and follow-up. During the last stage of the benchmarking process, we will monitor and follow-up the changes we have proposed. This can be one effectively by carrying out our assessment again next semester. Due to the fact that every semester, new exchange students arrive at the host


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university and the same formalities have to be carried out, the university has the opportunity to implement changes and see the effects of these changes on the short term. Strictly spoken, the assessment can thus take place twice a year. However, it is not recommendable to re-retrieve the priorities of the exchange students every semester as this process requires input from an external source (the exchange students) which is harder to manage and takes more time without bringing a lot of new insight. At the same time, it would also become more difficult to compare the performance of the international office every semester as one of the basis on which the evaluations done (the priorities of exchange students) could differ every semester. Therefore, we recommend to question the priorities of the exchange students once a year in a substantial way (e.g. the priorities of all exchange students who came to the host university during the last year could be investigated, this would improve the credibility of the study as the sample increases) and to score the KPIs every semester. Like this, the effects of the changes that were implemented can be tracked easily and without spending too many resources. It is important, however, that the evaluation of the performance of the international office should be done soon after the previous semester has ended, so that changes to processes can be implemented from the next semester on. If this is not possible, we will only be able to monitor changes made after semester one in the outcomes of the assessment of semester three. Conclusion. We have now implemented our benchmarking model at TH Wildau and the department of Commercial Sciences and Business Management of Vives South University College. We see that, overall, the performance of Vives is slightly better than the performance of TH Wildau. The most important reasons for this are the better housing situation at Vives, the good use of


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deadlines and the well-structured and up-to-date website of the university’s international office. We have been able to identify several good practices and have given advice on how to improve the performance at TH Wildau. When comparing these good practices with the priorities of the incoming exchange students at TH Wildau, we can say that the international office should focus on implementing changes related to the following three core main ideas: the consequent setting of deadlines, the centralization of tasks with strategic importance for the university, such as housing, and the up-to-dateness and simple structure of the website of the international office. Although the performance of the international office of Vives is excellent, it could improve its relationships with local health insurances, which TH Wildau has also done. However, it must first be investigated if the incoming exchange students at Vives find that a priority. Conclusion We have now developed a benchmarking model in theory, verified its robustness and implemented it at both TH Wildau and Vives. We have learnt from the literature review that the responsibilities of international offices differ. In order to overcome this issue, we have developed our own benchmarking model, which compares service levels of international offices on the basis of the needs of exchange students, which are more homogenous than the tasks of international offices. Our benchmarking model compares certain internal and external formalities that should be fulfilled in order to let a student study at the host university, checks the housing situation and evaluates the offer and price of integration-stimulating events. We have obtained feedback from four different parties on our theoretical benchmarking model. None of these parties has identified severe hurdles that would make the implementation of our benchmarking model impossible. However, the importance of the priorities of the


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exchange students has been stressed by our interviewees, and the idea that a ratio comparing the number of staff with the number of incoming exchange students at the host university could bring more insight has was risen. We have implemented both ideas in our work. In the last part of this thesis, we have implemented the benchmarking model in practice at TH Wildau and the department of Commercial Sciences and Business Management of Vives South University College in Belgium. By implementing the benchmarking model, we have been able to identify good practices and areas where improvements are needed.


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Conclusion Due to the increase in student exchanges over the last years and the higher European funds for the Erasmus+ project, quality management at international offices has become more and more important. We have started this work by reviewing the available literature on benchmarking in higher education environments, and based on the conclusions of the review, we have developed and implemented our own benchmarking model to improve service levels for incoming exchange students at universities. From the literature review, we have seen that the tasks and responsibilities of international offices differ across universities. So far, this has been a major hurdle for the development of benchmarking instruments that could be used at international offices across countries. We have argued that, internationally spoken, the needs of incoming exchange students are more homogeneous than the tasks of international offices, which makes it possible to compare practices of international offices in different countries by comparing their service offer to fulfil the needs of exchange students. We have benchmarked the following main groups of activities of the international offices that are directly linked to the needs of incoming exchange students: internal formalities, external formalities, housing and integration. Next to this, we have also compared a set of general KPIs to provide us with more insight in the other formalities. We have also developed a way to check how international offices respond to the priorities of its exchange students. Although we have obtained feedback about our benchmarking model from different international offices in different countries in Europe, and have implemented the benchmarking model at two universities in different countries, in the future, the benchmarking model should be implemented at more universities in order to verify its robustness and effectiveness.


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References Alstete, J. W. (1995). Benchmarking in Higher Education. Washington. Australian Universities International Directors Forum. (2012). AUIDF Benchmarking 2011 (pp. 1–82). Cottyn, J. (2014, September 21). Benchmarking at international offices: Interview with Johan Cottyn. (S. Devos). Crozier, F. E., Costes, N. E., Ranne, P. E., & Stalter, M. E. (2010). ENQA: 10 Years (20002010): A Decade of European Co-Operation in Quality Assurance in Higher Education. ENQA (European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education). European Commission. (2014a). Erasmus. Lifelong Learning Programme. Retrieved April 16, 2014, from http://ec.europa.eu/education/tools/llp_en.htm#tab-4 European Commission. (2014b). ERASMUS Charter for Higher Education 2014-2020. European Commission. (2014c). ERASMUS+ programme guide (2nd ed.). European Commission. (2014d). Erasmus+: the new EU programme for education, training, youth, and sport for 2014-2020. Erasmus. Retrieved April 16, 2014, from http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/index_en.htm European Commission. (2013, July 8). European Commission - MEMO/13/647. Retrieved from http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-13-647_en.htm German Rectors’ Conference. (2012). National Code of Conduct for German Universities Regarding International Students. DAAD. Gesellschaft für Empirische Studien bR. (2014). Internationale Studierende an deutschen Hochschulen und ihr Bedarf an Beratung und Unterstützung. Kassel: DAAD.


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Annex Next to the digital copy of this thesis, a digital version of the tables and calculations, which we prepared for our benchmarking model and the practical implementation of our benchmarking project, can be found enclosed (DVD/Benchmarking model and outcomes.xlsx).


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Declaration I hereby declare that I have written this Master’s thesis independently, without assistance from external parties and without use of other resources than those indicated. The ideas taken directly or indirectly from external sources are duly acknowledged in the text.

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