Governing Quality

Academic quality assurance, historically a national concern, has been evolving rapidly over the last several decades in reaction to the forces of globalization. The first response was the development in many countries of new national models for assuring academic quality in the context of adoption of mass systems of higher education (Brennan and Shah 2000; Dill and Beerkens 2010), which itself was a national reaction to the economic impacts of increased global economic competition. More recent responses include the development of regional and increasingly international organizations and regimes for academic quality assurance as a consequence of the globalization of the higher education industry itself (King 2009; Santiago et al. 2008a). This development of international institutions of academic quality assurance appears to be consistent with the ‘rational design’ theory of institutions (Koremenos, Lipson and Snidal 2001). This would predict that as transnational exchanges involving students, faculty, services and universityproduced knowledge grow international institutions will emerge to help reduce the associated transaction costs of these exchanges, including bodies for making and enforcing necessary agreements . Practices for assuring quality are relevant to all the traditional academic activities of universities, including the quality of services such as academic consultancy and knowledge transfer, the quality of basic research and of teaching and student learning. While there have been significant new national policies designed to assure the quality of research (Dill and van Vught 2010), the primary attention of academic quality assurance efforts at the national, regional and now global level has been on confirming and improving academic standards (Dill and Beerkens 2010), which is the focus of this chapter. By academic standards is meant the specific level of knowledge, skills and abilities that students achieve as a consequence of their engagement in a particular academic program and as such this definition of academic standards reflects the growing