Internationalization of the Palestinian higher education

Abstract EN

Internationalization has now become increasingly important in the Palestinian Higher Education sector.

It has many benefits such as: Mobility and exchange of academic staff, achieving international academic standards, and international research collaboration.

Consequently, graduates will acquire professional skills and academic knowledge to compete internationally.

Palestinian Higher Education Institutions (PHEI) have and practice some international aspects that lead to the questions: How to measure the extent of internationalization in the PHEI? Are the PHEI different in their internationalization practices and processes? This paper aims to answer such questions.

It has developed a new scoring scale (model) of eight dimensions with 53 elements and proportional indicators for measuring and evaluating the degree of internationalization at each Higher Education Institution and at the Higher Education System as a whole.

This new model was applied to a sample of seven Palestinian Universities.

Utilizing the descriptive analytical approach, results show that each university got a score within a range between 44 and 59 out of 100, and the average that represents the whole system was 51.4%.

This score is considered low and indicates that the Palestinian Higher Education System is below or about the middle in its process for Internationalization.

Moreover, it provided information on the good practices and priorities of Internationalization at the University level.

Such practices will enable the statutory bodies to steer the policies in pursuing Internationalization