Quality Assurance in Higher Education: Which Pasts to Build on, What Futures to Contemplate?

ABSTRACT

The paper is a reflection on the pasts and futures of quality assurance in higher education. It poses questions about the correlation between the geographical and political spread of quality assurance on the one hand and the resulting educational benefits on the other; about the divergences between critics and practitioners on the likely impacts of quality assurance; about centres and peripheries in quality assurance and the power of ‘good practice’ templates from the former over the latter; and about the possibilities for connecting quality assurance to broader social purposes beyond economic and consumerist notions of accountability. It concludes by raising the possibility that current versions of quality assurance may well cede ground to more metricated evaluation instruments as the economic and reputational ‘wars’ in higher education intensify and the added dangers that this would pose to any quality assurance interest in strengthening reflexity in the academic project.

Keywords:

• higher education
• quality assurance
• quality assurance trends
• quality assurance pasts and futures

Notes

[1] J.L. Brennan and M. Singh point to the shift in UK quality assurance from the demonstration of equivalence to the demonstration of difference in ‘Playing the quality game—whose quality and whose higher education?’ in Knowledge Matters: The Public Mission of Research Universities, edited by Diana Rhoten and Craig Calhoun, Columbia University Press (2010).

[2] The INQAAHE website lists 11 quality assurance networks spread across the Arab world, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Western, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America. See www.inqaahe.org

[3] Given the spread of quality assurance in the ‘developing world’, it is easy to have a particular image of its diffusion from the Northern centre to the Southern peripheries, but Rhoades and Sporn’s analysis (2002) usefully reminds us of the influence of US quality assurance on European higher education.