Measuring and comparing higher education quality between countries worldwide

The purpose of this investigation is to establish a unidimensional interval scale for measuring each country on the quality of higher education, based on indicators (items) characterizing various aspects of a country's quality. The data from these indicators are publicly available through the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), for all countries worldwide. Currently, a country's quality of higher education is summarized by simple descriptive statistics of these many indicators, and there seems to be a need to combine these results into a single measure of quality. A single measure of quality can facilitate a country's education quality to be monitored over time, enable a comparison of education quality between different countries, and help decision making relative to improving a country's quality of education. The results show that, with the Rasch partial credit model, it is possible to represent each country's quality of higher education by a single measure. Possible implications and extensions of this new scale are discussed.