Indicators of internationalization: what do academic rankings measure?

Abstract

One of the aspects that reflects the importance of the internationalization of higher education in the contemporary context is the creation of global academic rankings and the inclusion of internationalization indicators in these tools, which have significantly influenced university and government policies. In spite of the
prestigious status acquired by the rankings, its indicators still reflect a certain obscurity and, in this sense, they provoke debates about its capacity to measure educational quality. Considering this scenario, the objective of this article is to analyze the main international and national academic rankings, focusing on indicators related to the internationalization of higher education. International research, in the form of publication, constitutes the most significant indicator of internationalization for the investigated rankings, partly due to its quantitative
character, which makes the transnational analysis feasible. In the absence of qualitative and contextualized analyzes, with indicators and weights adopted according to theoretical justifications, the rankings end up not contemplating the totality of the objectives and missions that pervade the universities around the world, nor the complexity inherent to the concept of internationalization of higher education.