A prActicAl guide Benchmarking in european Higher education

institution reached 40% growth of first-year science students. 8 It might then
be interesting for your higher education institution, with 10% growth, to learn
how they managed to do this in order to emulate them. The steps in this
process controlled by the higher education institution, i.e. data collection,
identifying benchmark organisations and learning from them, constitutes
benchmarking as we use the term. 9
To the extent that relevant data are publicly available, national or even international
databases and rankings may show in which universities benchmarks
are to be found. But note the caveat about relevance of data. First, this
has to do with levels: many international databases collect data at national
level, and national averages can do no more than tell that one is performing
as good as the average higher education institution in country X. Second and
even more relevantly, this has to do with selection of indicators: how relevant
is the Academic Ranking of World Universities (known as the Shanghai Ranking,
www.arwu.org) with its emphasis on cited publications in natural sciences
and Nobel Prize winners for an academy in performing arts?
8
Imagine that there also was one higher education institution with an even higher growth of 70%, but that that
was due to its splitting off the Faculty of Arts, and that that was not an option for your higher education institution;
then this case would not be a relevant one.
9
Quite another matter is if these standards etc. are effective in solving the underlying problem in society, i.e. too
few persons in the workforce to fill all jobs that need science degrees. Maybe the indicator focusing on first-year
students led to allowing less-prepared students into the courses and in fact fewer will reach their degree than
before (good students are discouraged, and/or staff are too busy trying to ‘repair’ bad students), leading to
fewer science graduates in the labour market—policies may have perverse effects and it is never wise to focus
on a single indicator.
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