Abstract:  In the context of globalization, there is an increasing need of people with international vision as the communication of personnel between countries is more frequent. Universities are major institutions to train such people. The internationalization performance of their education is closely related to the quality of education and the level of talents, so improving the performance is important not only for educational institutions, but also for countries. However, most studies in this field focused on the evaluation system or indicators of internationalization of education, as many of them taking international communication and cooperation and internationalization of courses as key subjects. Besides, many researchers investigated the influence factors and analyzed the corresponding strategy, implementation and resources of schools. As for performance evaluation, most studies adopted surveys, interviews and case studies. It can be found that relevant studies tend to be incomprehensive and unrepresentative qualitative analyses of specific indicators and determinants, which failed to identify the front runners and direct the underperformed schools accordingly. In this paper we intend to address those limitations by practicing a systematic analysis from the definition, then the indicators system, finally to the performance evaluation. Researchers have tried to give general definition of internationalization of education with different emphasis but few have focused on its definition for specific disciplines. Particularly, business is at the top of all internationalized disciplines. Thus it is representative to study internationalization of education from this discipline. In our previous study, we proposed the concept of internationalization of business education with two-way communication and exchange at its core. Our research in this paper follows this idea. We then refine the evaluation indicator system of internationalization of higher education established in our previous work by taking the characteristics of business education into account and develop the indicator system of business education, which incorporates seven qualitative and fifteen quantitative indicators from five dimensions: strategy (1), teaching (2), research (3), management (4) and people (5). The indicators are as follows: establish the office of international affairs and programs (1-1), percentage of international communication and cooperation budget in total budget of the school (1-2), number of cooperation agreements signed with foreign institutions (1-3), percentage of courses taught in foreign language (2-1), percentage of courses using original foreign textbooks (2-2), implement credit and grade conversion with foreign universities (2-3), percentage of students going abroad (2-4), number of joint programs with foreign universities (2-5), percentage of staff attending international conferences during the last academic year (3-1), number of papers published in SCI,SSCI,EI and ISTP journals during the last academic year (3-2), percentage of staff been abroad for over six months during the last academic year (3-3),take internationalization as an evaluation factor of staff promotion and titles (4-1), make rules and regulations on overseas visit and study of staff and students (4-2), make policies and rules to encourage international exchanges of students and overseas visit of staff (4-3), provide abundant foreign books, journals and electronic learning resources (4-4), create a good internationalized atmosphere (4-5), percentage of international faculty (5-1), percentage of international students (5-2), number of people in charge of international affairs (5-3), number of visiting guests(not including students) from overseas during the last academic year (5-4), number of foreign visiting professors for communication during the last academic year (5-5), number of staff with overseas experiences (5-6). We then take 32 Chinese business schools and 16 foreign business schools as research sample and conduct surveys and field studies in sample schools to collect data. Among performance evaluation methods, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) can provide the direction for efficiency improvement through comparison with an efficient set of Decision Making Units (DMUs). Therefore, we adopt input-normalized DEA model to evaluate their performance from five dimensions respectively. Due to statistical difficulties of two indicators in teaching, sample schools are required to give interval data. Therefore, two DEA models are applied in the dimension of teaching with one calculating the lower bound of efficiency and the other the upper bound. In the dimension of strategy, Chinese business schools underperform due to fewer signed cooperation agreements with foreign institutions. In the dimension of teaching, Chinese business schools lag behind noticeably. Two foreign schools rank first when considering the lower bound of efficiency and three more foreign schools top the rankings when considering the upper bound of efficiency. By contrast, the rankings of Chinese business schools barely change in the two calculations. Their performance loss results from lower percentage of courses taught in foreign language, lower percentage of courses using original foreign textbooks and fewer joint programs with foreign universities. In the dimension of research, Chinese business schools outperform, which can be attributed to more articles published in leading indexed journals during last academic year. Increasing emphasis on research from Chinese universities can account for the result. In the dimension of management, there is no big difference between Chinese and foreign business schools. Most underperformed schools do not take internationalization as an evaluation factor of staff, while others lack abundant learning resources and internationalized atmosphere. In the dimension of people, the performance of Chinese and foreign business schools is similar. Compared with foreign ones, Chinese business schools encounter polarization and have lower proportion of international staff. Based on the evaluation results, we find that there is no big difference of internationalization performance between Chinese and foreign business schools in terms of management and people. Compared with their foreign counterparts, Chinese business schools perform better in research, but underperform in strategy and teaching, especially showing obvious weakness in teaching. In light of the performance loss of Chinese business schools, the suggestions for them to improve are given as follows: first, taking advantage of regional education resources and actively cooperating with foreign business schools; second, deepening the internationalization of courses by encouraging teaching with foreign language and textbooks while promoting joint programs; third, taking internationalization into account in the evaluation and promotion of staff, providing abundant learning resources in the school and creating internationalized atmosphere; last, attracting more foreign teachers and therefore increasing their proportion in the staff.

Key words: business education, internationalization of education, performance evaluation, data envelopment analysis