Towards a Normative Evaluation Criteria for Internationalization in Indian Higher Education

• In Event: Comparative issues in higher education across South Asia

Proposal

Introduction: Why Evaluation Criteria Matter

Internationalization has become a dominant policy agenda in Indian higher education, most prominently through the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and initiatives such as the Institutes of Eminence. These reforms position global partnerships, mobility, and visibility as markers of institutional success. This raises a critical question of evaluation: in what ways does internationalization truly advance sustainable and equitable higher education?

Current evaluative approaches rely heavily on global rankings, mobility statistics, and citation counts - metrics that privilege symbolic visibility over substantive outcomes. In India, policy framings from the National Knowledge Commission (2009), the Yashpal Committee (2009), UGC reports (2016), and NEP (2020) explicitly tie internationalization to climbing global rankings and attracting foreign universities. As Altbach and Knight (2007) and De Wit and Hunter (2015) note, this reflects a global trend in which internationalization has shifted away from its educational and cultural goals toward economic competitiveness, commodification of knowledge, and reputational gains. Such measures obscure institutional realities, reproduce inequalities, and reinforce global stratification (Marginson & van der Wende, 2009; Egron-Polak & Marmolejo, 2017).

What is missing is a normative evaluation framework: one that anchors internationalization in its contribution to institutional capacity, equity, and epistemic integrity. In line with this year’s conference theme, Re-examining Education and Peace in a Divided World, this framework asks us to see internationalization not as competition for visibility, but as a means of building more equitable, dialogic, and sustainable forms of higher education that can foster peace and understanding across global divides.

The central contribution of this study is to propose such Normative Evaluation Criteria:
1. Embeddedness in Institutional Capacity and Context
2. Equity in Access and Benefit Distribution
3. Epistemic and Pedagogical Integrity

This presentation will trace how these criteria emerged from a multi-case study research of two Indian universities, analyzed through the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework.

Framework: IAD as a Lens for Evaluation

The IAD framework (Ostrom, 2011) examines how institutional rules, norms, and resources shape actor behavior. Its focus on rules-in-use - the actual norms guiding practice rather than formal policy promises - is especially valuable for analyzing internationalization. Rules-in-use is the most useful element for the consideration of internationalization as it creates space to structure the action situation based on the real-time dynamics between actors.

Crucially, IAD emphasizes evaluation criteria as central to assessing institutional outcomes. It recognizes that institutional “success” cannot be taken for granted; it must be evaluated against explicit standards. Drawing on IAD, I argue that current metrics fail precisely because they lack a normative grounding in context, equity, and knowledge integrity.

Research Design and Data

The study investigated two Institutes of Eminence as case-studies:
1. A large public university, historically committed to access but facing severe funding and governance constraints.
2. A private university, globally oriented but operating within market logics of branding and employability.

Methods included:
1. Policy analysis of reforms since the 1990s;
2. 18 faculty interviews, examining perceptions and resistances;
3. Student survey (n=214), capturing experiences of benefits and barriers.

This design foregrounded the perspectives of faculty and students as they are voices often sidelined in official policy discourse but crucial to understanding how internationalization is enacted in practice.

Findings: Policy–Practice Disjuncture

Findings revealed deep tensions between policy ambitions and institutional realities:

1. Policy discourse emphasized competitiveness and rankings, but gave limited attention to institutional feasibility.
2. At the public university, reforms such as the Four-Year Undergraduate Program were introduced without structural supports - PhD-qualified mentors, advisors, or adequate general education faculty - rendering reform symbolic rather than substantive.
3. At the private university, the pace of internationalization was faster, but largely driven by branding and market imperatives, often straining workloads and bypassing deeper pedagogical reform.
4. Students expressed enthusiasm for international exposure, reporting perceived gains in skills and confidence. Yet access was uneven—costs, class, and English fluency filtered participation.
5. Faculty ambivalence was pervasive: they valued global engagement but critiqued superficial, performative strategies that sidelined local epistemologies.

These findings underscore that existing measures of success - numbers of partnerships, mobility rates, or publication outputs - obscure inequities and shallow practices.

Normative Evaluation Criteria

Using the IAD framework, I argue that internationalization should be evaluated against three normative criteria:

1. Embeddedness in Institutional Capacity and Context
Internationalization must be aligned with an institution’s resources, governance, and mission. Imposing “world-class” reforms without adequate capacity produces fragmentation and inequity.
2. Equity in Access and Benefit Distribution
Evaluations must ask who participates and who benefits. Without attention to socio-economic inclusion, affordability, and linguistic accessibility, internationalization risks reproducing social hierarchies (Bhushan, 2013).
3. Epistemic and Pedagogical Integrity
Faculty expressed concern that internationalization reduces to metrics and rankings, displacing local traditions and decolonial perspectives. Evaluation must therefore ask whether internationalization enhances intellectual rigor and pluralism, not merely reputational value (Chattopadhyay & Sharma, 2019).

Significance

Placing normative criteria at the center has critical implications:

1. For policymakers: It offers a grounded tool to assess reforms like NEP 2020 beyond headline metrics, ensuring attention to feasibility, equity, and sustainability.
2. For institutions: It helps leaders design strategies that strengthen mission and inclusivity, rather than chasing symbolic visibility.
3. For global research: It advances a semi-peripheral perspective, showing how Global South institutions can define internationalization on their own terms rather than simply imitating Euro-American models.

Conclusion

Internationalization is inescapable and in fact, critical for equity within national university systems, but its meaning and legitimacy are deeply contested. This study demonstrates that without normative evaluative criteria, internationalization risks becoming shallow, unsustainable, and unjust.

Through the IAD framework and empirical analysis, I propose a normative evaluation lens centered on capacity, equity, and epistemic integrity. This framework moves evaluation from counting partnerships and rankings to asking whether internationalization builds stronger, fairer, and more meaningful higher education. By centering normative criteria, we can ensure internationalization contributes to sustainable and socially transformative higher education in India and beyond.

Author

• Neelakshi Rajeev Tewari, Arizona State University