THE ROLE OF STRATEGY IN ACHIEVING PERFORMANCE AND INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION – THE CASE OF ROMANIAN ADVANCED RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES

The paper addresses the issue of strategy in higher education, applied to a group oftop Romanian public universities. After reviewing the concepts of strategy (and its related sub-concepts), performance and internationalization, the authors briefly analyze the websites of the twelve Romanian universities included in the category ‘advanced research and education’. The study assesses the chances of Romanian universities to be included in the category of ‘top universities worldwide’ and concludes that analyzed universities need to, at least, double their scores in order to increase their chances to enter international rankings. Finally, two very popular instruments (SWOT, benchmarking) are briefly presented and suggested to be applied in higher education.