Editorial

This issue of Quality in Higher Education ranges widely geographically. The focus of all the articles is how quality is understood in different circumstances and contexts. In particular, the articles focus on accreditation and its indicators, biases in quality measurement processes, the establishment of working quality management systems and on the continuing challenge of managing quality in transnational higher education.

Dirk Van Damme argued almost twenty years ago that ‘quality assurance and accreditation are not value-free activities’ (Van Damme, 2004, p. 158) and this is a concern behind two of the papers on accreditation in this issue of Quality in Higher Education. Accreditation, argues Maruša Hauptman Komotar, can be biased in favour of Western European institutions. In a comparative study of Dutch and Slovenian higher education systems, she investigates which practices are attached to accreditation and identifies key similarities and differences in its development and implementation. Bernd Kleimann and Malte Hückstädt investigate whether or not there is a similarity in the relative weight that universities of applied sciences and universities put on selection criteria in appointment procedures for professorships in Germany.

One of the underlying themes of much research on quality is the importance of developing explicit indicators to measure quality. In the light of recent comments by the World Bank reported by the Times Higher Education (Morgan, 2021) on the need for a ‘single ecosystem’ and improvements in the regulation of tertiary education to address a ‘waste of human resources’ in private universities, it is useful to have two articles on Latin American higher Education. Gabriela Gerón-Piñón, Pedro Solana-González, Sara Trigueros-Preciado and Daniel Pérez-González analyse the management indicators used by higher education institutions in South America to identify those that have more impact in obtaining an institutional accreditation. In an article on the Argentinian experience, Dante J. Salto explores accreditation of graduate business programmes by foreign accreditation agencies and finds, amongst other things, that programme leaders are using foreign accreditation as a means to gain a lead over other programmes.

Whilst quality management of transnational higher education continues to be debated by scholars, there is still very little substantial work that explores the perceptions of key stakeholders, such as the students themselves, of externally provided programmes. In this issue of Quality in Higher Education, Christopher Hill and Nitesh Sughani explore questions regarding the perception of transnational higher education in Dubai, as a case study of one of the most popular destinations for highly ranked UK universities. In particular, Hill and Sughani’s research focuses on student perceptions of providers, value for money and their study choice patterns.

The challenge of developing an effective quality management system is addressed in the Turkish context by Davut Pehlivan and Kadir Cicek. In their study of maritime higher education institutions in Turkey, they propose a knowledge-based model for assessing compliance to ISO 9001:2015 to provide meaningful information to design an effective quality management system, identifying gaps and areas for improvement. Similarly, Azar Abizada and Fizza Mirzaliyeva evaluate an honours programme launched in the Azerbaijan Republic in 2014 by its Ministry of Education to introduce advanced curriculum and interactive teaching. Their findings, which indicate that honours students are more satisfied than non-honours students, highlight the impact on students of this early attempt to implement new approaches to learning and teaching in Azerbaijan.