OECD is very reliable and you can find reports on educational systems and reforms. Other sites to explore are World Education Services (http://www.wes.org/ewenr/13june/index.asp), NAFSA (http://www.nafsa.org/Find_Resources/), Institute of International Education (http://www.iie.org/), British Council Intl Higher Education updates (http://ihe.britishcouncil.org/); I would recommend PIE news (http://thepienews.com/) and Australia-based PIER for recent trends, stats and analysis in intl higher education; and you can find lots of resources provided by PIER (http://www.pieronline.org/links) and the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education (http://www.obhe.ac.uk/what_we_do/key_resources)
To see what happened in 2011 and 2012, give "higher education market report" to Google News, Google Scholar and Google. Then give "distance education" and MOOC to ResearchGate, Science Direct etc. to see the trends.
You might consider reaching out to the UK Council for Graduate Education. http://www.ukcge.ac.uk/main/home I and a colleague from Johns Hopkins had a poster presentation at one of their conferences. We were very impressed with the breadth of their network and the quality of contacts we made there.
Thank you so much for your hints. In the meanwhile, I found valuable indicators, reports, country studies and raw data at OECD webpage too (http://www.oecd.org/edu/eag.htm).
OECD is very reliable and you can find reports on educational systems and reforms. Other sites to explore are World Education Services (http://www.wes.org/ewenr/13june/index.asp), NAFSA (http://www.nafsa.org/Find_Resources/), Institute of International Education (http://www.iie.org/), British Council Intl Higher Education updates (http://ihe.britishcouncil.org/); I would recommend PIE news (http://thepienews.com/) and Australia-based PIER for recent trends, stats and analysis in intl higher education; and you can find lots of resources provided by PIER (http://www.pieronline.org/links) and the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education (http://www.obhe.ac.uk/what_we_do/key_resources)
The difficulty with a lot of the benchmarks is that different countries have different systems. For example, both France and the UK have institutions called Universities, but they don't perform exactly the same rôle (French universities do not educate the high fliers, the "grand écoles" perform this function). When you're not comparing like with like, statistics can be very misleading. .