This issue starts with an extended editorial that revisits the definition of quality 30 years on. It is followed by seven articles dealing with value for money, accreditation, course co-ordination, technical education, rankings, outcomes-based education and joint programmes.
Christopher G. Reddick and Branco Ponomariov explore the return on investment of university education in the United States. They analyse data from the US Department of Education College Scorecard, focusing on institutional factors, such as public or private, student body characteristics, research intensity, student diversity and selectivity. The research concludes that the evidence reveals that, taking into account the full spectrum of American higher education institutions, value for money is better at public universities. Private universities do not provide a better return on investment, especially in the lower categories of the Carnegie Classification. However, they do outperform public institutions within the exclusive group of Research 1 universities: those institutions with very high research activity. Thus, when it comes to seeking greater value for their money, a guiding principle is that public research universities perform better.
A second article on the United States by Robert Eaglen, Steven Durning, Holly Meyer and Christopher Candler analyses the processes of seven accreditors of health profession education. Accreditation of the health professions is assumed to be a reliable form of quality assurance. Their study, though, suggests that there is a need to establish clearly defined principles for quality improvement in accreditation practices so that they serve the dual purpose of the accreditors and the institutions they accredit. Some accreditors, they discovered, failed, for example, to recognise institutional or programmatic strengths. Accreditation is complex, and it is important to understand how it functions if it is to meet public expectations of quality assurance.
Ola Holmström and Ola Stjärnhagen explore the importance to students of coordinated courses (modules) in a university programme. Based on a substantial survey that examines content, workload, administrative procedures and information from teachers, the research examines student perspectives on the coordination of courses. They show that how students experience their studies is significantly affected by the coordination of courses. The better the course coordination, the more satisfied the students are. Although each programme has its own conditions, such as duration, complexity and objectives, both course content and form are of great importance to how students, regardless of the programme, experience their studies. This does not mean that course coordination operates in isolation from quality work on the programme. Rather, it is an integral part of quality culture in higher education.
Pooja Choudhary, Neeraj Kumar, Alam Ahmad and Samreen Akhtar set the cat among the pigeons by maintaining that on evidence from the Punjab, technical education in India is suffering from declining quality. In the wake of rapid growth in the number of institutions providing technical education, the authors seek out the various factors for declining quality. The data is from a sample of students and teachers at 31 engineering institutions in Punjab. The results show different perspectives from teachers and students. The former consider ethical factors to be the most important factor in the decline, while students rank economic factors as the most important.
Noting the problematic nature of ranking systems in higher education, Kyle Grayson and J. Paul Grayson concede that despite the fundamental flaws in ranking systems, such as using convenience data to provide ‘objective’ measures of ‘quality’ and ignoring the different perspectives of different stakeholders, British universities take the results seriously. The analysis, though, shows that there is no quality hierarchy of British universities as presented in media-constructed league tables. Instead, universities fall into clusters defined by a value-added coefficient, student satisfaction, research and the cost of research. Thus, potential students, as key users of such league tables, would be better served if given information on the clusters rather than the contentious and misleading league tables.
Huong Thi Pham and Phuong Vu Nguyen have explored the extent of the shift to outcomes-based education in Vietnam and the role of the ASEAN quality assurance scheme in that shift. Examining the external assessment reports of 17 study programmes undertaken by assessors from the ASEAN University Network-Quality Assurance (AUN-QA) agency, the study indicates that there are some signs of a shift to outcomes-based education as a result of complying with external requirements. However, they note that when it comes to constructive alignment with curriculum design, compliance tends to be on paper only, rather than in educational practice. They go on to compare and discuss the improvement-oriented ASEAN approach vis à vis the Vietnamese accountability-oriented quality assurance scheme.
Lina Zenkienė undertakes a social realist study of the quality practice in joint programmes in the European Higher Education Area. Fieldwork took place at five partner universities. The public and internal document data consisted inter alia of institutional web pages, reports to European institutions, quality strategy and external programme evaluation results, totalling approximately 330 pages. The research notes the tension between quality assurance as a bureaucratic and administrative task and quality improvement: a tension arising from a multiplicity of actors with competing demands and requirements. Staff have thus developed a ‘shared practical understanding’ that programme improvements and daily tasks should be prioritised over bureaucratic tasks.