Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This chapter examines the rationale, processes, and outcomes of the public regulation of higher education qualities. At one extreme, all higher education relationships could, in principle, be governed by the state; at the other, by private negotiation between the principal parties such as universities and their students, although this latter would take place under the relevant general law of contract, arbitration law, and so on. All governance arrangements in practice will have consequences (some intended, others unintended) for the nature of the relationships which define higher education including termination of relationships as occurred recently, for example, in South Africa when state registration of certain MBAs was withdrawn. From a general equilibrium perspective, these consequences may impact significantly on the dimensions of many other relationships outside the higher education industry. In public policy terms, a government selects which higher education relationships it will regulate, and how such regulation will be effected. The reasons for such choices, as well as their consequences, all of which can differ across place and time, occupy a prominent position on the agenda of research into the public regulation of higher education attributes and standards.

A major change that has accompanied the worldwide ‘massification’ of higher education is the new-found openness of policy makers to the use of competitive markets to steer the university sector. In many countries efforts to improve the quality of publicly provided higher education, both in teaching and in research, are leading to experiments with market-based policy instruments (Teixeira et al. 2004). The perceived quality of universities in the competitive US system – which Trow (2000) has termed the ‘American advantage’ – has inspired much of this interest in market forces. While a number of these market experiments may also be motivated by a desire to restrict public expenditures in rapidly expanding systems of higher education, many policy makers and academics believe that there is a relationship between the degree of market competition and academic quality (Dill 2005).

This chapter investigates how quality assurance affected the performance of higher education at the macro, meso, and micro levels. The emphasis will be at the macro and to some extent the meso levels of (collections of) countries and higher education institutions. I shall approach my question first with some theoretical considerations, mainly informed by neoclassical economic theory, broadened to a general theory of (political) behaviour (based on De Vree 1982; Lieshout 1984; Westerheijden 1988) and to some extent by neo-institutional economics (as summarised in Eggertsson 1990). Blackmur gave a more extensive economic perspective on the regulation issue in Chapter 2. The theoretical issue in this partial theory of quality in higher education is what are the interests of actors in quality? The neoclassical theory forcefully underpins the proposition that “what gets measured, gets done”, that is, higher education institutions adapt to their steering environment, leading to different emphases in institutions’ performance depending on the conception-in-use of ‘quality’ held by external actors (quality assurance agencies, ministries, supranational bodies, etc.).

Stimulated through supranational and international organisations such as the EU and the OECD, picked up and implemented by national governments in various parts of the world, and with an array of new organisations supporting quality both internationally (e.g. the European Foundation for Management Development) and nationally (e.g. intermediate evaluation agencies), the concept of quality has been one of the most dominating and influential ‘meta-ideas’ globally over the last 20 years, invading both the private and the public sector (Micklethwait and Wooldridge 1996; see also Czarniawska and Sevón 1996). In the mid-1990s, US observers Cameron and Whetten (1996: 265) even argued that the concept of quality had actually replaced effectiveness as the central organisation-level variable in higher education:

A fundamental shift has occurred recently in the literature of higher education. This shift has been more gradual and less dramatic than it has been in the broader organisational studies literature, but it has been significant nevertheless. It is a shift away from considerations of the construct of effectiveness to describe organisational performance in institutions of higher education and toward considerations of the construct of quality. Quality has begun to replace effectiveness as a central organisation-level variable in higher education. With a few noticeable exceptions, effectiveness has largely been abandoned and quality has become the pre-eminent construct.

Quality assurance is not an easy topic to review from a policy perspective in the United States because of its bewildering variety. The absence of a national system of public higher education (and its associated ministry), coupled with the presence of myriad independent colleges and universities, mean that the function of quality assurance is both decentralised and dispersed. Individual states hold responsibility for funding and governing public institutions with concomitant variations in how they define ‘quality’ as well as their commitment and approach to determining if it is present. In parallel, responsibility for directly assuring quality for all institutions is delegated to a range of non-governmen`tal accrediting organisations, which operate under the regulatory aegis of the federal government, but which are otherwise diverse and independent. The resulting complexity – which is shared to a lesser degree by other federal systems like Germany – renders any attempt to determine the dynamics and impacts of quality assurance in US higher education a challenge indeed.

This chapter sets up the basis of a conceptual framework for the comparative study of quality assurance in higher education. It approaches quality assurance as a policy domain and looks into the policies that are formulated and implemented therein. The objective pursued by the construction of such a framework is to check for crossnational policy convergence and the extent to which national idiosyncrasies still play a role – and, if so, of which nature – in the current context of international harmonisation. More generally, the proposed framework aims at providing a range of tools to understand cross-national convergence in quality assurance policy, the mechanisms through which this convergence takes place, the components of the quality assurance policy that converge and those that, on the contrary, do not.

Fifteen years ago Peter Drucker (cited in Massy 2003) predicted that “universities will be relics in 30 years”. Although Drucker may have overstated the case, the fact is that nowadays higher education can no longer take its values and privileges for granted (Massy 2003). For Amaral, Magalhães, and Santiago (2003: 131), higher education is being exposed to the influence of significant external pressures that result from the “convergent effects of financial restrictions … rising expectations and social demand, mandates of the new economy and a weakening of its symbolic capital”. Santos (1996) argues that the university today lives a triple crisis: loss of its social legitimacy and of its hegemony relative to knowledge production, as well as an institutional crisis. Massy (2003) has labelled this situation “the Erosion of Trust”, stating that “settling for good enough erodes the public’s trust in higher education and puts institutions and faculty at risk” (Massy 2003: 3).

The ongoing debate surrounding quality reviews in higher education continues to raise a number of issues that would benefit from further exploration and development. One of these concerns is the micro-level outcomes of the increasing use of externally imposed and implemented macro-level regulatory quality assurance systems in higher education (Brown 2004). Micro level in this chapter refers to the teaching/learning processes in tertiary institutions including curriculum planning, the interaction between teachers and students in the learning environment and the development of learning communities, among others. Macro-level refers to national/state higher education policies that affect tertiary institutions. Many questions remain unanswered about how micro-level, day-to-day activities associated with teaching and learning in higher education can be improved through macro-level quality reviews.

Quality assurance of higher education has become ubiquitous. The International Network of Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education is worldwide, embracing every continent, with membership from about 80 countries. Stensaker (Chapter 5) argues that quality assurance is not just the latest fad but is a remarkably successful management fashion: a success, this chapter suggests, that is sustained by government endorsement because it provides a means of securing accountability.

The intention with the current book has been to study the regulation, translation, and transformation of quality assurance from a number of perspectives and by different approaches. By doing so we have underlined the multifaceted nature of quality assurance and the many interests associated with the concept.

Three common elements have, nevertheless, emerged from the different perspectives and approaches utilised to study and analyse quality assurance in higher education:

This final chapter intends to further develop these common elements, by calling the reader’s attention to some of the most interesting ideas expressed by the authors during the 2005 Douro Seminar and that underlie all chapters in this volume. It is also our intention to go through unresolved issues and challenging questions that constitute interesting issues surrounding quality and quality assurance in higher education. We will start by reviewing the contributions to the book.