Comprehensive platform will enable higher education institutions to compare performance across key indicators

A new benchmarking tool for higher education institutions across Europe is set to launch in mid to late November 2025, following extensive development and testing phases. The tool, which draws on data from approximately 3 500 institutions, promises to provide useful insights into institutional performance and peer comparisons.

The platform, developed using EHESO-ETER data alongside external sources covering publications and patents, will offer two distinct viewing modes: an 'at a glance' view for quick overviews and an expert view for detailed analysis. Both interfaces are currently undergoing finalisation, with internal and external testing taking place in October 2025.

The benchmarking tool represents a significant development in higher education data analytics, offering institutions a powerful resource for strategic planning, performance assessment and peer learning across European higher education systems.

Intelligent peer selection methodology

At the heart of the tool lies a sophisticated peer selection algorithm that identifies the 15 most similar institutions for each participating organisation. This allows calculating pairwise distances across eight key indicators, including institutional age, size measured by academic staff, education intensity, master's degree orientation, PhD intensity, subject concentration, relative specialisation in STEM fields, and the presence of a university hospital.

The algorithm normalises scores and adjusts distances for specialised institutions before calculating Euclidian distances for each pair, ensuring meaningful and relevant comparisons between institutions with similar characteristics.

Comprehensive indicator framework

The benchmarking tool will encompass seven main categories of indicators, providing a holistic view of institutional performance:

• Resources indicators will examine human, financial and infrastructure capacity, including metrics such as total academic personnel, senior staff ratios and the share of revenues from core budgets.
• Teaching and learning indicators will measure focus on educational activities and student outcomes, featuring data on graduate numbers across qualification levels, master's degree orientation, STEM graduate percentages and dropout rates at bachelor's level.
• Research indicators will assess research output and quality through metrics including PhD student ratios, publications per academic staff member, citation performance in top journals and participation in EU Framework Programme projects.
• Knowledge transfer measures will evaluate engagement with industry, tracking academic patent intensity, industry cooperation in EU projects, co-publications with industry partners and income from continuous professional development.
• Regional engagement indicators will capture collaboration and impact at the regional level, including research revenues from regional sources and the share of graduates working in their study region.
• International orientation metrics will assess globalisation through foreign academic staff ratios, mobile student and PhD percentages, international joint publications and Erasmus+ programme participation.
• Societal challenges indicators will address broader social goals, featuring gender balance in staff and students, mature student ratios and the intensity of publications in information and communications technology.

The platform will present the most recent data from 2022, with time series information available in the expert view to enable trend analysis and longitudinal comparisons.

Timeline, testing and training 

Development work is well advanced: the lost of relevant indicators has been finalised in consultation with stakeholders and both tool prototypes have been created. The development team is currently finalising the data requirements and tool development for both viewing modes, incorporating feedback received on the visual prototypes.

Following the October testing phase, which involves both internal reviewers and external stakeholders (including EHESO data coordinators from the Community of Practice), the tool is scheduled for launch between mid and late November 2025.

A dedicated training session will be held on 17 December 2025 to help higher education institutions make the most of this powerful analytical resource. If you are interested, please register by 15 December.