The Relevance of International Evaluators in Capturing the National Higher Education Context in Institutional Evaluations

This paper aims to contribute to the ongoing discussions of whether international experts can correctly grasp the system-level features when evaluating higher education institutions. The analysis ofa sample from EUA’s Institutional Evaluation Programme (IEP), which only uses international experts in its evaluations, shows that international experts accurately capture the system-level features. Moreover, they bring an additional value to institutions by referring to the European frame-work policies and practices by addressing the feasibility of these policies and practices for the individual institution. The results thus, support the view that the internationalisation of quality assurance has the potential to generate new perspectives in external quality assurance.