Abstract
In Kuwait, as in other rapidly‐developing higher education systems, one major area of concern is ensuring the quality of education offered by private providers. This paper briefly reviews the history of the development of higher education in Kuwait since its inception in 1936. It considers various quality systems currently in place in other countries in the Gulf States in order to locate its own quality system within other local practices. It then provides a case study of how Kuwait has developed a system of quality management of the country’s private higher education sector. It is hoped that this will provide others who face this issue with a useful model of how to cope with this recent development worldwide.