As you all know, a reasonable chunk of my work involves making international comparisons. This is far from simple in higher education because basic units of analysis differ enormously from one country to another. Whether you are counting students (do doctoral students count, when in some countries they are classified as employees? How do you equivalize student numbers for part-time status, which exists only in some countries?), or staff (how do you equivalize by rank? Do teaching-only staff count? What about part-timers?), it’s all very complicated. It’s the same with counting and categorizing systems by the type of institutions, which is our subject today.

When it comes to institutions, there is no standard international typology that allow good apples-to-apples international comparisons. UNESCO and OECD, the two big international agencies that look at this stuff, both sidestep the question by categorizing students and expenditures by “education levels”, as described in the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED). For higher education, there are four levels that matter – level 5 (“short-cycle tertiary”), level 6 (bachelor or equivalent), 7 (master) and 8 (doctoral).

The problem is that very few countries actually organize their systems this way, and as a result, they don’t collect data this way, either. To take just one example: the United States  as a matter of policy  assumes that all (non-graduate) students in post-secondary education are heading towards a bachelor’s degree. The fact that most students in 2-year institutions are not doing this is irrelevant: the way the transfer system is set up, it is  possible  for students to be heading towards a bachelor’s and so that is how they are categorized. As a result, it often looks like the US has a huge 4-year system and a non-existent 2-year system even though that’s not even vaguely the case. It’s just an outcome of UNESCO/OECD trying to jam all these different  institutional  systems into a single  credential-based  classification system. And as the line between academic programs and professional/ vocational ones gets ever-more blurred (think of Canada’s polytechnics, for example), using ISCED to understand systems of institutions gets more fraught.

Here at HESA Towers, we’ve been working on a new global higher education monitoring project for a while now (well, I say “we” but actually it’s mostly our VP, Jonathan Williams, and his team who deserves the credit). And one of the things that has consumed us is understanding how to compare different institutional types across the globe. I’m not going to unveil the whole thing right now, but I’ll give you a peek at what we are thinking about, because it’s an interesting problem.

The simplest types of institutions to categorize are those which specialize in delivering what UNESCO calls level 5 credentials – that is, what we call “community colleges”. About 80% of the world’s top 50 higher education systems have some kind of institutional type that specializes in short-cycle credentials, even though they might go by very different names (community colleges here,  Universidades Tecnológicas  in Mexico,  Instituti Tecnici Supreiori  in Italy, etc.). And they seem to make up about 20% of the world’s post-secondary enrolments.

The next simplest to describe – although they are a pretty mixed bunch – are those that  mostly  specialize in bachelor’s level programming, but still have the ability and inclination to deliver shorter and professionally/vocationally-oriented programming.  T hese are institutional types that usually started out as short cycle institutions and grew into another, larger role.   These kind of institutions often have names like “University of Applied Science”, “Institutes of Technology”, or “Polytechnics” (though few of the Canadian institutions that go by this name would qualify because for the most part they are not permitted to make bachelor’s level programming the bulk of their offerings). The  C entros Federais de Educação Tecnológica  in Brazil fit under this description, as do  Hogeskolar  in Sweden. About 40% of top global systems have institutions like this, but they tend to represent a pretty small portion of overall enrolments.

What’s left of the world systems are all, technically speaking, “universities” i.e. those who only deliver programs at ISCED level 6 or above. But they come in many, many shapes and sizes.

The South Asian countries (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan), which collectively account for about 20% of world enrolments, rely very heavily on what they call “colleges” – mostly small institutions (tens of thousands of them) “affiliated” with major universities, such as the University of Delhi. They’re cheap because the infrastructure is weak and the professors have low qualifications – but the affiliation with the “real” university and the need to teach to its exams provides the quality control. Offshore education – branch/international campuses and the like – have a similar structure, though the gap in quality between the “parent” and the “satellite” institution is probably smaller and the transnational nature of the relationship makes the regulatory and oversight process different. Right now, we’re debating whether they should be classed together, or separately (there is some value to giving everything its own category, but also some value to keeping the number of categories limited).

Then there is the question of whether comprehensive and specialized institutions belong in the same box or not. Just a little over half of the top 50 systems in the world have these, ranging from  academies of music or dance (which, in most of Europe, are considered equivalent to universities though they are not here), to industry-specific institutions like the Royal Military College, the Police University in Vietnam, the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, etc. Should these have their own category? (Added difficulty level: some countries, like Canada, have specialized institutions but does not specifically categorize them as such, complicating consistent counting).

And now we’ve narrowed it down to a group that might be called “comprehensive universities”, which offer programs across a range of disciplines and collectively teach about half of the world’s 200M+ students. But even here one can draw distinctions. Around the world (including Western Canada), there are universities that are legally limited to bachelor’s degrees and prohibited from conducting research. Do they belong in the same category as big research universities? Can you even identify them from a nationally-produced list of universities (in Canada, you can’t, for example, but in Hong Kong and Brazil you can – should one bother making distinctions if you can’t make them consistently?)

You can see how tricky this taxonomy business is. If you have any feedback on these issues, we’d love to hear it.

Anyways, once we develop these kinds of stable categorizations, we’ll be applying them to a new data set of national-level data sources that we’ve been researching that cover the 50 countries making up well over 90% of the world’s student body and research output. We’re on our way to building a database no one else in the world has about the relative financial health of national higher education systems, with data going back to before the last financial crisis. That is, data on some of the kinds of data OECD uses each year in its “Education at a Glance”, only more finely-tuned and covering the entire globe. We hope to be able to roll this all out sometime this summer.

And yes, this is considered what is considered “fun” at HESA Towers.

Stay safe, everyone.