Everlasting Friends and Enemies? Finnish University Personnel’s Perceptions of Internal Quality Assurance in 2010 and 2017

ABSTRACT

Even though quality assurance has played a role in European higher education for decades by now, it is still a topic of great discord. While several studies have focused on the initiation phase of quality assurance, little attention has been paid to the question on how attitudes towards quality assurance in higher education change over time. This study compares the attitudes of Finnish university personnel using data from 2010 and 2017. The results show that personnel experience quality assurance as slightly better in 2017 than in 2010, while differences concerning gender, personnel group and type of university persist. The findings underline the importance of implementing quality assurance in a stakeholder-specific way.

KEYWORDS:

• Quality assurance
• internal quality assurance
• Finland
• university personnel

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This paper uses the term “higher education institutions” (HEIs for short) or “universities” to refer to both research universities and universities of applied sciences. Both types of universities exist in Finland: there has been a dual system since the early 1990s (Ala-Vähälä, 2016).

2 For the purpose of the present study, we have used the term “personnel” to describe the entirety of persons working at a higher education institution. This includes three main groups:

• Research and teaching: persons doing research and teaching in equal weight, persons doing mainly teaching or persons doing mainly research (for example professors, lecturers, researchers)

• Management: persons in management positions on the level of graduate programs, research units, at faculty or department level, central administration or top administration (for example quality managers, deans, vice deans, heads of division. program managers)

• Support and service: persons in counselling or other costumer service positions, persons in support positions on the level of graduate programs or research units, faculties or central administration (for example student advisory services, IT, library personnel, laboratory engineers).

3 The comparison is based on the items addressed both in 2010 and 2017 (cf. Table 1).

4 For the measures under analysis, the differences identified in 2017 agree with the differences identified in 2010. The statistical tests analyzing the data from 2010 reveal highly significant differences concerning gender, type of university and personnel group. The differences in the sample of 2010 are highly significant without exception, while the differences in 2017 are not exclusively highly significant. When comparing the overall changes within the groups in detail, the results show that, except for the gender-based comparison, the perception within the groups slightly converged: while the women’s perception stayed on the same level, men became slightly more negative towards quality assurance. The attitude of persons from the research and teaching field as well as from the management field stayed the same, while persons from support and service positions became a bit more positive and are now on the same level as persons working in management. The time-based comparison concerning the type of the university revealed that both types became slightly more positive towards quality assurance and their levels converged a bit.