Are quality assurance and rankings useful tools to measure ‘new’ policy issues in higher education? The practices in Europe and Asia

ABSTRACT

In the last years, ‘new’ policy issues, such as sustainability, have emerged, and old ones, such as social inclusion, have resurfaced on the political and public agendas. Higher education institutions (HEIs) are increasingly expected to respond to these ‘new’ challenges. But how are HE systems and HEIs (namely in Europe and Asia) looking at these ‘new’ policy issues and assessing them? This article focuses on what issues are being looked at by two of the most well-known tools or mechanisms used to assess the quality of HE – quality assurance and rankings – and how are these tools dealing with these ‘new’ challenges. This article concludes that the role of the ‘new’ policy issues in the assessment of institutional performance and quality is still very limited. Developing indicators that may be used for accountability purposes or improvement purposes is a major challenge that lies ahead. Facilitating the exchange of ideas, experiences, and knowledge on how to measure performance on the ‘new’ policy issues and on how to use that information in any of the rationale settings seems to be a promising way forward to get the ‘new’ policy issues embedded in quality assurance tools.

KEYWORDS:

• Quality assurance
• rankings
• higher education
• Europe
• Asia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://education.ec.europa.eu/education-levels/higher-education/higher-education-initiatives/inclusive-and-connected-higher-education (accessed 4 May 2022).

2 https://www.eurostudent.eu.

3 https://sdgs.un.org/goals.

4 https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20190205081112460 (accessed 4 May 2022).

5 https://smartqual.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IO1.A1_State-of-the-Art-QMS_Clustering_Report.pdf.

6 SMART-QUAL – Structured indicators to manage HEIs’ Quality Systems is a project co-funded by the Erasmus+ KA2 programme. The consortium of the project is composed of different European HEIs and Quality Assurance agencies, and a Research & Development organization. These are as follows: University of Minho (Portugal); Conexx-Europe (Belgium); University of Aveiro (Portugal); A3ES – Agency for Assessment and Accreditation of Higher Education (Portugal); Politecnico di Torino (Italy); Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (Spain); AQU – Catalunya Catalan University Quality Assurance Agency (Spain); Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium); and SKVC – National Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (Lithuania).

7 https://www.shanghairanking.com/rankings.

8 https://www.timeshighereducation.com/.

9 https://www.topuniversities.com/.

10 www.umultirank.org.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Erasmus+ KA2 programme Project reference 2020-1-BE01-KA203-074900.

Notes on contributors

Frans Kaiser

Frans Kaiser is a senior research associate at the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies (CHEPS), University of Twente, since 1988. He has been involved in numerous international comparative studies on higher education policies and trends in higher education. He coordinated a number of projects in which tools and visualizations were developed to allow analyses and presentations of large and complex datasets on higher education and higher education institutions (U-Map and U-Multirank). As member of the secretariat of the Dutch Review Committee on Higher Education and Research (2012-2016) he developed various dashboards to evaluate and monitor the performance contracts of Dutch universities.

Ana I. Melo

Ana I. Melo is an Associate Professor at the University of Aveiro and a researcher at the Centre for Research in Higher Education Policies (CIPES). Her current research interests lie in the areas of performance measurement and management in public services, namely higher education. She has been involved in various projects in which several performance indicators were proposed to measure the quality of different institutions. Her publications include articles in journals such as Public Management Review, International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Higher Education and Studies in Higher Education. She is also the editor of books and co-author of chapters edited by Palgrave and Springer.

Angela Yung Chi Hou

Angela Yung-chi Hou is a Professor of Higher Education and Associate Dean of the College of Education, National Chengchi University, Taiwan. She served as Executive Director of the Higher Education Evaluation & Accreditation Council of Taiwan, from 2016 to 2021. She has been actively committed to quality assurance practices and international research for more than 15 years, including serving as Vice President & Board Member of the International Network of Quality Assurance in Higher Education and Vice President & Board member of the Asia Pacific Quality Network. Since 2013, she has been recognized by Springer as one of the top 24 Asian researchers in the higher education field by publishing more than 130 academic papers and monographs.