The Legitimacy Of Quality Assurance In Higher Education

In this publication, quality assurance is seen as part of the public responsibility for higher education. The contributions by policy makers and practitioners consider the role of quality assurance as an element of higher education governance and explore its function in the recognition of qualifications. Case studies illustrate its various aspects in two different national settings.--Publisher's description.

European higher education institutions are facing in these last years a number of relevant political and social changes that have asked for more transparency, accountability, comparability and legitimacy of degrees. In light of these new challenges, the great majority of universities have responded by implementing quality assurance processes, either through evaluation or through accreditation. This book collects the evaluation and accreditation experiences gathered by higher education institutions in Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom and Sweden. It provides a synthetic picture of the present state of quality assurance practices in Europe and offers a few lessons for a future European dimension of quality assurance.

Introduction: The background for and the ambitions of the current book -- PART 1. The Global Study. External quality assurance: The landscape, the players and developmental trends -- Quality assurance: Legitimacy, efficiency and control issues -- External quality assurance: Comparative reflections -- Institutional quality management: Comparative reflections -- PART 2. Regional Studies. QA in higher education in Africa: A synoptic view -- The Arab States: Quality assurance trends in higher education -- Internal and external quality assurance of higher education in the Asia-Pacific region -- Eastern Europe: Quality assurance trends and challenges -- Latin America and the Caribbean: Quality assurance trends and challenges -- Northern America: Quality assurance trends and challenges -- Western Europe: Quality assurance trends and challenges.

This report assesses the status and practice of higher education quality assurance in Sub - Sahara Africa, focusing on degree - granting tertiary institutions. A main finding is that structured national - level quality assurance processes in African higher education are a very recent phenomenon and that most countries face major capacity constrains. Only about a third of them have established structured national quality assurance mechanism, often only as recently as during the last ten years. Activities differ in their scope and rigor, ranging from simple licensing of institutions by the minister responsible for higher education, to comprehensive system - wide program accreditation and ranking of institutions. Within institutions of higher learning, self assessment and academic audits are gradually being adopted to supplement traditional quality assurance methods. However, knowledge about and experience with self - assessments are limited. The main challenges to quality assurance system in Africa are cost and human capacity requirements. For countries with large tertiary systems, the report recommends institutional, rather than program accreditation as a cost - effective option. However, where tertiary systems are small and underdeveloped, a less formal self - assessment for each institution may be necessary until the capacity could be strengthened to support a more formal nation quality assurance agency in the long run.

The significant growth of number of students enrolled in tertiary education institutions in the recent past decades has caused an unprecedented expansion of higher education systems. The rapid and constant social, economic and technological mutations and international competition make the importance of qualitatively well-educated citizenry and labor forces very decisive. Globalization has developed a powerful impact on the development of higher education and imposes new challenges for the organization (standards, financing, regulations). Systems of higher education tend to detach from the national models and adopt a more "global" orientation. The implementation of quality assurance is one of the recent and most decisive transformations of higher education. Different higher education systems are trying to develop assessment tools (internal and external) to improve the quality of teaching, research and extension activities, and these are either based on experiences of selected countries or are extensively country specific. The quality assurance procedures that were often dependent on national directorial traditions have gradually tended to converge and led to a setup of common tools and standards. Countries under a centralized system tend to impose a uniform and general model while decentralized systems give greater freedom to universities to set up their own quality. International rankings of universities also contribute to impose a set of transnational standards and values, which is also being considered as indicative by the stakeholders. The present book tries to look at the quality assurance mechanism, international rankings and its impact in both absolute and comparative fashion in context of 11 countries from different parts of the world.

This title was first published in 2001. Universities in developing countries have followed their counterparts in developed countries and adopted quality assurance to improve the quality of their activities. This text examines the wisdom of such a move when many of the conditions necessary for its success are not present. It concludes that quality assurance can be useful in developing countries because it shows how a university's seemingly disparate activities are related to one another to serve a common goal and how the quality of these can best be improved by using an integrated approach. Quality assurance also provides more focus and direction to the work of the traditional university system. However, it must be modified to suit the conditions prevailing in developing countries by being simple in design, modest in expectations and realistic in requirements.

The management of quality and sustainability in higher education institutions ensures that proper standards are maintained. Such enforced standardization allows for the highest caliber of training opportunities for various fields and disciplines. The Handbook of Research on Quality Assurance and Value Management in Higher Education is an authoritative reference source for the latest scholarly research on quality management and assurance programs and standards in college-level environments. Highlighting global perspectives on academic and professional learning, this book is ideally designed for researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and professionals actively involved in the field of higher education.

The topic of achieving and assuring quality in every higher education institution continues to be both relevant and urgent worldwide. This volume presents a considered discussion of a range of facets of the issue, drawing on the findings of a 3 year EU research programme involving seven countries: Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Latvia, Portugal, Poland, Slovakia and the Netherlands. Topics include access, student assessment, governance, stakeholders, academic faculty, information and the interface between the secondary and tertiary sectors. The authors, all of whom are drawn from the research teams, explore particular aspects of the research objectives. These aim to identify the drivers and overcome the barriers to establishing high quality in both European higher education, in relation to the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance and, by implication, in worldwide higher education.