Analyzing the relative efficiency of internationalization in the university business model: the case of Germany

ABSTRACT

Internationalization impacts universities and changes their core missions. Consequently, many western universities adopted a business model approach to deal with opportunities and challenges internationalization poses to their missions. Resulting from increased scrutiny from the public and policy makers on the ability of universities to efficiently utilize public resources to achieve institutional missions, interest is growing to analyze this development and its effects upon the university business model. This paper's purpose is to examine and evaluate how internationalization within the university mission impacts the university business model. Using a sample of German universities, this study develops a unique, three-stage, mathematical analysis to investigate this connection. By determining the internationalization and overall efficiencies of each institution relative to peers in the dataset, it is found that no direct correlation between the relative internationalization and overall institutional efficiencies exists, while also evidencing the usefulness of efficiency analysis in allocating resources for internationalization and overall university mission achievement. These results show that while the relative efficiency of internationalization may contribute to a university’s overall relative efficiency, other components in the university business model may also be critical in determining overall relative efficiency, and the interplay of these components should be investigated in future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• internationalization
• efficiency
• business model
• university mission
• performance evaluation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The value of environmental factors is based on data from The Federal Returning Officer (source: https://www.bundeswahlleiter.de/en/bundestagswahlen/2017/strukturdaten.html).