GLOBAL: Three nations tops in collaboration

With more than three million students studying outside their own countries, and rising, universities and governments are keen to know what kind of environment increases the inflow and outflow of students, and how countries compare in encouraging collaboration overseas.

A new index launched at the Going Global conference attempts to quantify how open to different ways of international collaboration a country's higher education system is.

Developed by the British Council with the Economist Intelligence Unit, the index tracked policies in 11 countries to quantify international collaboration, overseas branch campuses, joint academic programmes, publications and patents, academic and student mobility, visa policies, quality, access and recognition of foreign degrees.

Germany topped the overall index with a balanced focus on importing and exporting education. Australia and Britain were second and third respectively, having the most open environments to international collaboration and ambitious internationalisation policies.

China and Malaysia were snapping at their heels with ambitious aims to internationalise higher education.

"What sets Germany apart is its fairly even focus on both importing and exporting elements. While it targets 20% growth in the number of inbound students, it also has the most comprehensive outbound support programmes of any other country in this study," the report says.

Germany is one of the few countries that prohibit public institutions from charging higher fees for foreign students, or opening for-profit branches abroad. If it did allow this it would score even higher, the report says.

The UK and Australia have often been seen as focusing narrowly on the direct monetary gains of recruiting foreign students at the expense of promoting outbound student and academic mobility. Yet both score highly on quality assurance and degree recognition.

The report notes that China and Malaysia, in fourth and fifth place respectively, are good examples of how quickly a country can change from exporting students to importing them.

Malaysia is attracting foreign students and aims to become a regional education hub while China's ambition is to create 100 world-leading universities.

"Both place a strong emphasis on supporting students, researchers and academics with outbound study and placements," the report says.

The internationalisation index is made up of three new indices. These seek to measure national policies, international student mobility and international research collaboration. Adding the three results together gives a final score.

The report notes that the most developed countries tended to have the "most appealing" environments for higher education, possibly mimicking more open business environments in general.

Meanwhile, countries such as Brazil and India currently ban foreign institutions operating branch campuses, pushing them lower down the index.

Developing countries, however, are more likely to promote access to studies abroad, with Brazil helping the largest proportion of domestic students with overseas studies.

Germany and Britain also scored highly on this measure, in part because of access to the EU Erasmus programme which funds mobility. Germany also has the most extensive national academic mobility programme.

More than half of the 11 countries studied have no overseas presence. By contrast the US has 76 branch campuses overseas, Australia has 15, Britain 11, India 10 and Malaysia five. Russia has a branch campus in Dubai.

China has no branch campuses abroad but has 12 foreign institutions operating there, compared with just one overseas institution established in the US.

Britain not only operates branch campuses abroad, such as Nottingham Ningbo in China, but attracts them as well with five US and one Malaysian university established in the country.

Foreign campuses play a much bigger role in emerging markets such as China and Malaysia where they number almost 8% of the local institutions, compared with 2% in Britain and 1% in Germany.

The report suggests that collaboration is more common at the programme level than between institutions because it is cheaper and has been continuing for many decades. Australia and Britain are most active in delivering courses overseas, with British institutions running 412 undergraduate and 75 postgraduate programmes in Malaysia alone.

The data indicates that cross border research collaboration is strong and almost a third of all publications are co-authored with foreign researchers. In Germany, the proportion is as high as 46% of publications, followed by Australia at 42%.

In China, though, foreign collaborations are closer to 16% of publications compared with India's 21%.

India, China and Nigeria have been recording double digit growth in research collaborations, with China registering around 17% growth. But this could be falling as locally authored research is growing faster.

Britain has a large proportion of foreign researchers at 42% of its 50,350 doctoral students, compared with 26% in Germany and 20.5% in Australia. The US counts the number of doctorates awarded rather than overall students and in 2009, 31% of American PhDs were awarded to foreign nationals.