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U.S. Mapping Internationalization Assessment Tool

The American Council on Education (ACE), or more specifically its Center for Internationalization and Global Engagement, developed and released in mid-May a free online tool that allows college and university administrators in the US to “assess the state of internationalization and global engagement at their institutions”. This instrument – the Mapping Internationalization Assessment Tool – was purposefully designed to be simple and user-friendly. It requires users to answer not more than 12 questions about various dimensions of their institution’s internationalisation strategy. The 12 questions are, ACE explains, a representative sample from the full Mapping Internationalization on U.S. Campuses survey (3rd edition) and provide a “holistic review of international programs and policies” at American higher education institutions.

The ACE assessment tool uses not only some of the questions, but also some of the related data collected through its latest internationalisation survey, facilitating thus not only self-assessment but also a sort of inter-institutional comparison/benchmarking. Survey data from US institutions were collected most recently in 2011 when ACE surveyed 3 357 accredited, degree-granting institutions, and were published in 2012. In short, after the users of the new tool have answered the 12 questions, they get a report that tells them how their institution compares to the colleges and universities that participated in the survey.

The ACE hopes that the tool will help institutional leadership to

  • “highlight the strengths of their current internationalization initiatives;
  • identify areas for improvement to become a more comprehensively internationalized institution; and
  • utilize data to make the case for internationalization efforts on campus.”

The ACE release comes to complement similar instruments already developed in the European context, such as the cross-national IMPI toolbox or the MINT tool run by the Nuffic in the Netherlands (both of a more comprehensive nature).

American Council on Education