An assessment of internationalization impact on engineering education quality scores: A Brazilian case study

Abstract

Internationalization is a trend topic in terms of research, including in engineering education. It is a consensus in the academic literature that competitive advantages are related to the development of skills considering internationalization. The objective is to provide an assessment of the internationalization impact on different education quality scores, taking as proxies well established rakings. Multivariate methods are used to estimate the importance of each variable in education quality score. The coefficients of a regression model are employed to ponder the relative importance of internalization on quality assessments. Going further, the impact of largest program of internationalization, "Ciências sem Fronteiras", after almost three years of its creation, is evaluated. Furthermore, comparative analysis is conducted to trace how Brazil behaves compared to other countries. Finally, the analysis focus strictly on the engineering domain, taking into account the specificities associated, such as the technical expertise which may be developed with internalization process and the real impact on economics aspects. The findings highlight clearly the importance of internalization indexes as majors explicative variables to quality assessment scores.