Where the Quality Discussion Stands Strategies and Ambiguities Sudhanshu Bhushan

REFLECTING ON QUALITY ASPECTS OF HIGHER EDUCATION GLOBALLY WITHIN THE CONFINES OF MY STUDY AT HOME – IN ISOLATION DURING THE TIMES OF COVID -19 !!

 HERE I GO .......................... 

 Multiple factors have converged to provoke the current international preoccupation with quality and standards in education during the past several decades the rapid expansion of tertiary education; the simultaneous shrinking of public subsidies for higher education; the knowledge explosion; the need for universities to acquire more expensive infrastructure; the mobility of professionals and researchers; and, finally, the increasing worldwide competition for prestige and often for the same funds, students, and faculty. Moreover, expectations of the output and achievement of higher education have become increasingly complex. At one time, the purpose of higher education might have been to provide a thorough grounding in classical knowledge or preparation for a few specific professions. In the recent past, a diverse public looks to universities as engines of development, social equalizers, professional training grounds, and centers of continuing education, among other things.

Universities are under pressure from many directions to reform long-standing traditions and pedagogy, account for their activities and use of resources, and address broad social agendas. National governments have implemented policies to diversify higher education, encourage greater operating efficiency, improve productivity, increase fiscal independence, and foster more competition between institutions. Also, there is a growing demand for greater accountability to a new array of education "consumers." The challenges facing higher education to measure up against diverse and often ambiguously defined expectations are vast.

At the very least, most countries have now accepted the need for both greater accountability and for some formal process to assure multiple constituencies that higher education is being evaluated regularly in a transparent way. During the last decade, the discussion has moved beyond national borders as regional and international organizations endeavor to find comparability between degrees and congruency and harmony among the quality-assurance schemes now in effect.

Quality means so many different things to different people. But "Whose quality?" It has become increasingly problematic that different stakeholders judge quality against divergent values and priorities. Nevertheless, the quality movement has moved forward, leaving many fundamental concepts and much vocabulary undefined.

 The Changing Quality-Assurance Discussion

 In its early stages, the quality-assurance movement was largely motivated by waning confidence in higher education. So many new types of institutions were awarding degrees to an expanding student population that concerned stakeholders were questioning the comparability of degrees. The general lack of information about the internal workings of universities and, colleges became a cause for concern. "Opportunistic politicians" exploited the uncertainty of students, taxpayers, and employers about growing public investment and the value of a university degree to impose new reporting obligations on higher education.

Since the 1980s, nearly every nation has introduced some kind of quality assurance scheme in higher education. Typically, an intermediary agency is established to coordinate the information needs of government and individual institutions. In most cases, the process begins with standards or fixed criteria to structure internal and external evaluations that provide information to external stakeholders and identify opportunities for improvement to the academic community. Programs initially approach easily verifiable or measurable (quantifiable) criteria. In its earlier stages, the US system emphasized "inputs"-such as size of the library, number of professors with advanced degrees, faculty/student ratios, and rates of graduation. In the United States and elsewhere, measurable criteria have expanded to include faculty publications and citations, faculty awards, and grants secured. Increasingly, the pursuit of quality has led to the perplexing challenge of measuring the nonquantifiable characteristics and production of higher education.

As institutions have begun to make peace with the relevance and inevitability of greater accountability, the discussion has moved to a deeper level. It is increasingly apparent that quality in higher education requires more than responding to standards. Now, scholars are insisting that quality must be imbedded in institutional culture, not regarding specific criteria, and that the process must be ongoing rather than just a periodic response to an audit or inspection. If the process of ensuring quality is to be ongoing then the responsibility lies with individual institutions to integrate quality-assurance into all levels of activity. With many new layers of quality-assurance in place it is lime for politicians and the larger society to again trust that universities can indeed determine and protect the quality of their work .

 The discussion of criteria, standards, measures, and validation continues to evolve. There are (in practice) two levels of quality management-one involves a sequence of procedures to document and report; the second requires the consideration of less-tangible aspects of higher education. With growing international experience, the discussion has become more nuanced with the recognition that the challenges of quality-assurance are ever more complex.

 When confidence in colleges and universities wavered, new programs for external supervision were put into effect. The vocabulary that accompanies these new programs is daunting, mostly because the same or similar words are used without similar meanings: quality-assurance, quality management, quality control, and quality enhancement. The mechanisms to measure quality may include accreditation, audit, assessment, and external monitoring.

 Countries may review entire institutions, specific degree programs only, or both. Systems are both voluntary and compulsory. Where accreditation is voluntary, there are usually incentives to participate. In the case of the United States, for example, accreditation is voluntary, but institutions must be accredited to receive funds from the national government for student financial aid or research. In most fields of study, US students must graduate from accredited degree programs to qualify for a professional license, likewise in Argentina. In Chile, the program of accreditation is voluntary but extremely useful as successful completion of the review provides programs and institutions with data to legitimize demands for additional resources.

 The United States relies on two levels of accreditation, both managed by membership organizations. Regional membership associations certify the performance of colleges and universities, while nonprofit professional member organizations review and accredit individual degree programs. More often, accreditation, audits, and external reviews are coordinated by quasi-governmental agencies. Still. the process is generally the same-self-studies are conducted, teams of peer evaluators are evaluated, reports are compiled and reviewed, and some decision is taken.

 The process requires an enormous commitment of time and resources. While the self-study itself is a serious undertaking, in theory it is an opportunity for an institution to step back from daily activity, assess strengths and weaknesses, build on the former, and resolve the latter. The value of the endeavor depends, to a large degree, on the extent to which the academic community is engaged. When quality-assurance is viewed as an external obligation, simply as accountability to an external audience, the process is easily delegated to specific administrative office or an external consultant with limited impact; it becomes a bureaucratic exercise. When the process is viewed as an opportunity for honest reflection and includes a broad range of participants, the potential for improvement and development is much greater but so, alas, is the effort. The literature returns over and over again to the ambiguous goals of this process and what it accomplishes. Of course, there are multiple goals-reassurance that public money is being spent wisely, that students are learning. that degree studies are relevant, that institutions are attentive to opportunities and necessities for improvement, that faculty are properly qualified. and many more. The processes of accreditation, audits, and assessment as current1y followed lend themselves to measuring some things better than others. The impact of all of this effort has proven very difficult to measure.

 What Does “Quality” Actually Mean in Practice?

 One of the enormous challenges confronting the quality issue is defining quality in higher education. The quest for a broadly useful definition is ongoing. Quality is generally agreed to be desirable even if it is indefinable, but the ambiguity of its meaning complicates the design of systems to ensure it.

 The fact that the quality-assurance discussion has moved to an international level adds linguistic challenges to the confusion over definitions. Distinctions made between words such as "assessment' and "evaluation" in English have no equivalents in many other languages. Different constituents and stakeholders use different constructs for addressing quality in higher education. To complicate the discussion further, quality often becomes tangled with the related, but separate, issues. We now have the "need to go beyond formalities and definitions of quality and pay more attention to good practice and how this can be demonstrated". Something needs to be demonstrated and this is the challenge going forward.

 As already stated, there are many approaches to ensuring quality, but the emphasis is often on evaluating without a clear idea of the objectives the process is meant to achieve. The ambiguity contributes to some degree of doubt about the value and impact of so many evaluations taking place today. I remember reading about Yogi Berra, an American baseball player as famous for his quotable comments as for his athletic achievement, once said "You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you are going, because you might not get there." This applies to much of the quality-assurance schemes operating today.

 Regulation, Accountability, and Autonomy

 In many cases, quality-assurance schemes arose from a general "need to know." As higher education expanded and diversified, governments were unable to provide the level of control or supervision exercised in the past. Nor was that level of national presence seen as desirable any longer. Yet an ongoing tension exists between government authority and institutional autonomy. Responsibility for quality-assurance sits at the fulcrum of that tension. Quality-assurance schemes unavoidably represent some level of external regulation, and these schemes can be contentious, depending on who establishes the procedures and measures and how they are implemented.

Does higher education need to be regulated or can it regulate itself? Are quality-assurance schemes a mechanism for external regulation or for keeping external regulation at bay? It was suggested that despite the appearance of greater autonomy, the devolution of responsibility for quality from the state to individual institutions was passed along with norms of performance still determined by governments or parastatal agencies, allowing the state to "hedge its bets." As I read somewhere as Harvey and Newton describe it, "establishing delegated accountability"

 Concerns are frequently raised about whether institutions can truly "police" themselves and whether doing so allows institutions to become too complacent. In the United States, despite a long history of self-management, the federal government has frequently expressed dissatisfaction with the level of performance expected of higher education institutions. As a result, the national government has made repeated attempts to use its funding clout to impose additional standards for institutional performance in areas not addressed by regional institutional accreditation. While the national government was not successful, many state governments have followed suit exercising greater control through performance- based funding. Indicators commonly added include time to degree, class size, student retention, and faculty workload. These easily quantifiable outcomes provide public reassurance, but it is not so clear whether they ensure academic quality.

 The line between accountability and regulation is a fine one. Accountability means "coming clean" or revealing to external constituencies details deemed important. Institutions that receive public funds are understandably obligated to account for how those funds were used but to what end and with what results.

 I would suggests that accountability may indeed serve as an impetus for improving performance and therefore, perhaps, a component of quality assurance. But reporting on performance does not represent assuring quality, and that this activity might work against quality improvement if accountability pushes institutions to conform to external standards that constrain diversity or inhibit the autonomy institutions need to foment their own development. Accountability can too easily come down to responding to a checklist of predefined criteria established externally and passing an inspection at regular intervals.

 Yet institutions should be accountable for their performance. Institutions accept public and private funds to deliver a service and should be able to verify that good service (if not excellent) was indeed provided. There is a great deal at stake for participants, most importantly students whose personal and professional future opportunities are often shaped by this educational experience but for the larger society as well. The question is, of course, how to incorporate accountability usefully.

 Standards and Accreditation

 The concept of "standards" is in itself ambiguous and interpreted differently in various systems. In the United States, "standards" is used interchangeably with "criteria," although in Europe the meaning is different. Standards generally provide a critical reference point but may refer to minimum requirements, targets for performance, measures for comparison. Standards can be applied to academic content covered, intellectual abilities demonstrated, service provided, among other aspects. Despite the vast meaning(s) of standards, this concept generally serves as the basis of quality-assurance programs.

 I would suggest that from the public-policy perspective, academic quality requires the assurance of academic standards. But, whose standards? How specific? How high? How low? Different processes are followed to check or validate that some predefined standards have been achieved.

 Accreditation refers to a process resulting in a decision that warrants an institution or programme; audit explores internal processes; assessment passes a judgment (often with a grading) usually about the quality of a teaching or research subject area; and external examination checks standards (be they academic, competence, service or organizational).

 The term "accreditation" is increasingly used in international discussions of quality. It is often viewed as a guarantee that standards have been established and honored. In their glossary compiled with support from UNESCO, Vlasceanu, Grunberg, and Parlea offer the following definition:

 The process by which a (non-) governmental or private body evaluates the quality of a higher education institution as a whole or of a specific educational programme in order to formally recognize it as having met certain pre..determined minimal criteria or standards.

 The United States has the longest-standing system for institutional accreditation, a system unusual because of the absence of a national authority over higher education. Also unusual in the international context is the long experience with institutional diversity within this sector. Educational institutions in the United States belong to one of six regional membership associations, depending on where the, institution is located. Despite some variations, the process of accreditation follows the same general pattern throughout the country-self-study, external review, agency recommendations, and decision. This process has been imitated by most quality-assurance programs around the world, with the difference that the coordinating agency (elsewhere) typically has some connection to government.

 The other commonly followed pattern, also originated in the United States, is mission-driven evaluation. In other words, to accommodate the diversity of institutions and their objectives, an institution or program is often evaluated in terms of its success if meeting the goals it set for itself. This concept implies a great deal of elasticity within standards. While this flexibility offers many advantages, it also allows mediocre institutions to adjust their goals so that they can be easily fulfilled or provides the opportunity for "manufacturing an improved identity".

 It is still conceived as possible to apply carefully formulated standards across institution types, but as mentioned, this glosses over the less-attractive realities within higher education. External evaluators are expected to have the skill to adapt standards to each unique context. This places enormous faith and responsibility on peer evaluators who may have had little or no training for this kind ·of activity. The practice risks lax interpretation and at the same time the possibility of turning peers into inspectors.

 How far can standards be adapted to diverse environments before they lose their value and utility? At what point do standards become simply a mechanism for certification? Is conforming to standards enough to guarantee a threshold for quality?

 The introduction of relative rather than absolute standards by which to "judge" institutions or courses raises issues of comparability. Quality as conformance to (relative) standards tells us nothing about the criteria used to set the standards .... For quality to be conformance to relative standards seems to undervalue the notion that quality implies something "above the ordinary" and the conformance standards set may seem rather ordinary and in no way exceptional.

 Standards, while important, are often overemphasized in quality-assurance programs. Standards can be written so that they are irrelevant or unrealistic in a particular environment. Conforming to standards without consideration of context accomplishes little. At best, standards can serve as a framework for organizing evaluations, not as well as precise measurements for comparison purposes. At their worst, standards function as a meaningless checklist and distract from a deeper consideration of quality. Yet, much credibility is placed on value of standards and accreditation as will be explored later in this chapter.

 Prestige

 Prestige is another characteristic often viewed as a reflection of quality. Prestige can be misleading, though as it emanates from a complex convergence of circumstances. Generally, prestige is highly correlated with the research productivity of a university's faculty. It can also be a reflection of institutional wealth, difficulty of gaining admission, "star" faculty or, more recently, a position in one ranking or another. Correlating prestige with quality is risky as an institution's reputation so often results from one or more specific characteristics or activities and rarely reflects the broader performance of an institution.

 Prestige also comes from less-rational public perception. Rankings have achieved considerable influence in the current "marketplace." Not only have rankings ramped up competition between institutions but also greatly shaped the perception of quality. Although few educators concede that rankings are an indication of quality, students, parents, and policymakers often do. Trow (1998) warns us that the rankings more often only affect how and what institutions report rather than encourage significant improvements in quality.

Rankings vary widely in the criteria they use; and despite being explicit about methods and meaning, the general public focuses more on an institution's placement in the rankings than how it got there. Rankings often rely on "reputational measures" that tend to be not only highly subjective but also self-perpetuating. Yet, rankings are widely popular, and their influence in the quality discussion cannot be overlooked.

 Rankings are perhaps most seductive because of their ease of use. It is unrealistic to hope that" consumers" of higher education will review self-study reports or reports completed by external evaluators when comparing institutions. Rankings provide easy answers; they advise prospective students that a university ranked at 5 is better than a university ranked at 21-of course, with limited validity. Institutions are not so easily compared. A number of alternatives are being introduced to make better comparative data available. A new Web site, College Portrait, has been set up by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities to compare US schools. These organizations' effort to be fair to the diversity among institutions quickly opened them to criticism for their lack of precision. The Center for Higher Education Development in Germany publishes data to allow students to construct their own rankings, according to their needs. For now the rankings still have undue influence in the discussion of quality.

 Competition and Markets as Driving Forces

 A myth in vogue at one point was that a competitive higher education market would be a powerful incentive for institutions to improve the quality of their activities. This assumption has been debunked by a number of scholars. It is now recognized that competition may actually have perverse effects, diverting funds to investments that will enhance an image in the "marketplace" or in the dramatic rhetoric of an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report, "to throw their best assets overboard in the rash attempt to keep their university afloat"

One of the fallacies in suggesting that competition will improve quality is assuming that people have access to good information and use it to make thoughtful and rational choices:

 It is assumed that the student has insufficient information about the quality of academic institutions or programs to make discriminating choices. If such information were to be provided, either by institutions under government mandate, or by independent quality-assurance agencies, it is assumed that subsequent student choices would provide incentives for institutions to improve their academic quality.... However, this logic rests upon a long and complicated causal chain, which assumes that reliable and valid measures of academic quality readily exist and that students will base their enrolment choices on this type of information.

For most individuals, let alone teenagers, the official processes of quality assurance schemes and accreditation are incomprehensible and, as a result, not terribly useful. Rankings provide data that are easily referenced. As a result, they are also appealing. Their growing influence has meant that many colleges are now focusing resources on investments that promise a better position.

 In a competitive market, it is important to keep in mind that non academic factors often sway an adolescent's college choice. Increasingly, colleges are using residential facilities and amenities such as luxury dorms with swimming pools (Fogg 2008) and double beds over the traditional twin to compete for students. While market forces drive change and "improvement," the results may not have any bearing on the academic performance of the institution.

 Institutions compete for top faculty as well as top students. Likewise, the competitive pressure may serve to focus resources on gains with limited impact on the quality of an institution as a whole. In fact the competitive market for high-profile faculty only diverts attention from teaching and learning and concentrates resources on prestige:

 [T]he indicators of academic prestige drown out the weaker signals of the quality of teaching and student learning, and the aggressive pursuit of prestige crowds out the activities associated with the improvement of academic standards .... [T]he dominance of the prestige goal in systems of mass higher education encourages all institutions to invest in cream skimming the student market, in building their research capacity, and in incentives designed to recruit and retain the most prominent scholars/ researchers. The pernicious effect of this competitive pursuit of academic prestige is that it diverts resources as well as administrative and faculty attention away from the collective actions within universities necessary to actually improve academic standards.

 I would like to warn that hiring well-known research faculty diverts attention from teaching and encourages "individual academic autonomy," in the hands of star research faculty, at the expense of "individual involvement in the collective quality-assurance activities of academic program planning and co-ordination". In other words, competition tends to sidetrack resources that could well have had a broader impact on institutional quality. The pursuit of prestige tends to encourage focused efforts rather than deeper ones. Instead of investing in long-term strategies for institutional development, universities often leverage limited resources to draw attention through accoutrements such as star faculty, investments to improve ranking position, or more luxurious student amenities.

 Refining the Discussion

 In their early stages, quality-assurance schemes tend to pursue the most obvious strategies, validating the qualifications and workloads of professors, infrastructure and resources, preparedness, and progress of students. It was assumed that addressing the basic building blocks of higher education and responding to the external pressures for increased accountability and competition would produce better quality. However, there is no simple formula for quality-assurance. The lack of definition and ambiguity of objectives come back to haunt. Quality-assurance programs-accreditation, audits, or whatever-result in some level of institutional change. The question is what kind of change, and is it the desired change. At the very least, the requirements of accountability built in to most quality-assurance schemes have obliged institutions to do a better job capturing and organizing data. But that is not enough.

How quality in higher education is being considered and judged is shifting as nations acquire experience with evaluating institutional and program performance. There is increased attention to the “transformative” role that higher education should play in the development of their students.

 That quality is demonstrated by the impact that an institution has on its students, in particular on their personal and intellectual development asks whether improvement in student learning has occurred commensurate with raised standards applied to higher education. What will be required is further understanding of the impact of higher education on students, but to date both methodology and data are lacking.

 Until recently, quality assessment has paid surprisingly little attention to the fundamental activities of teaching and learning-where, of course, institutions have the greatest impact on students. Yet, important as these activities are, they are not easily measured, compared, or benchmarked. The number of faculty publications, student examination results, graduates who work in their field of study or go on to advanced study are of only limited use in measuring quality when viewed from this perspective.

 Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO), an ambitious new initiative of the OECD is proposing to develop meaningful measures of learning outcomes intended for use on an international scale. AHELO proposes to examine institutions on the basis of four categories-general skills (analytic reasoning, critical thinking, ability to generate ideas, the ability to apply theory, writing skill, leadership, etc.); discipline-specific skills (expertise in a field of study); learning environment (physical and organizational characteristics, student-faculty interaction, psychosocial attributes, behavior and attitudinal outcomes); and value added to the development of individual students. The usefulness of this kind of evaluation and data to quality development is indisputable. That OECD does not expect AHELO to be "up and running" as a reflection on just how challenging this undertaking will be.

 In the meantime, academic tradition may make it difficult to refocus evaluations and audits on the learning and pedagogy. Powerful trends work against the growing concern with teaching and learning by quality-assurance agencies. Prestige, rankings, and funding reward research more readily than excellence in teaching. Dill suggests that incentives encouraging a growing "faculty disengagement" from the classroom not only undermine the quality of teaching but also distract from "collective faculty activities such as curriculum development, teaching evaluation, and student assessment". The emphasis on scholarship and productivity encourages faculty to work independently, yet improvements of academic programs require faculty to work collectively. Dill emphasizes the importance of "the internal transfer of new knowledge on improving teaching and student learning" to support the pursuit of excellence. Developing processes for the assessment and improvement of student outcomes will require an integrated institutional engagement that will necessitate a shift in incentives and rewards to faculty and other members of the academic community.

 What Have We Learned?

 The challenge of how divergent ideas about quality and quality-assurance can be translated to higher education institutions is a difficult one. Despite all of the ambiguity, mechanisms for some level of quality-assurance and shared benchmarks have become essential. There must be a means of communication from inside higher education institutions to the outside.

 Attempts to borrow concepts and processes from other sectors are problematic as quality in other arenas is more easily measured as specific outputs. Exactly what the output of education should be is a subject of contentious debate. Yet, quality should no longer be taken for granted, and there is a general need for a mechanism to validate that each institution provides something valued by the larger society.

 Moreover, it has been learned that the interpretations of politicians, institutional administrators, faculty, and students about what reflects quality in higher education are different and that quality-assurance systems in use serve the needs of some constituents more than others.

 Quality has been addressed in most countries through a now almost standard protocol for evaluating activities in higher education. This process involves obliging institutions to establish internal procedures for monitoring their success in achieving standards of quality, followed by a periodic external inspection to verify and expand on the results of the internal evaluation, all under the auspices of an agency with some official recognition.

 Institutions are no longer permitted to "police themselves" without some kind of impartial external validation. Yet, self-regulation remains a critical piece of the quality-assurance process. What most national quality schemes accomplish today is to ensure that the evaluation sequence described earlier takes place. The external system that exists to ensure "internally propelled quality management" is adequate. How effective the process is depends entirely on the level of institutional commitment and engagement, which, of course, varies from one institution to another.

 The crucial factor in a system of academic quality control, monitoring, and improvement lies in efforts to create an institutional culture marked by self-criticism, openness to criticism by others and a commitment to improvement of practice.

 For now, there really is no alternative to trusting institutions with primary responsibility for their own performance . The activities of today's modern colleges and universities are too vast, too complex; ongoing external coordination and oversight is impractical as well as undesirable.

 No external agency, no accrediting body or coordinating council, can assess academic units with the accuracy and in the detail necessary to make good judgments and decisions. Nor can their assessments have the legitimacy for the institution and its units that internal reviews carry with them when they are done properly.

 External control will always have limited impact on quality improvement and possibly could work even to the detriment of improvement rather than its enhancement depending on the way the control is exercised. For now, periodic evaluations or inspections can be best used to ensure that procedures are in place for ongoing self-assessment and improvement and for verifying the content of evaluation reports. Considering that most external evaluators are on site for only a few days, they rely on the information presented to them; the knowledge they gain about an institution cannot go very deep. Regardless of how eminent, distinguished, and important the members of expert panels may be, data gathering, information processing, and strategic considerations could for a priori reasons constitute the Achilles heel of these models.

Institutional leadership and culture of an institution are key to the pursuit of quality. Quality-assurance has to be fully integrated into institutional management and operation. By engaging broad participation in a commitment to quality, an institution will always be attentive to weaknesses and opportunities to improve. This type of engagement will promote the "collegial connections and communication of academic norms that will lead to quality academic programs". Most institutions are still learning how to do this.

 The Internationalization of Quality

 The mobility of students, scholars, and programs has contributed to the urgency of pushing the quality discussion to an international level. While established international organizations-OECD, UNESCO, and International Standards Organization-are addressing the implications of increasing cross-border activity, many new organizations are assuming a role as well.

 There is a growing trend toward international cooperation to achieve mutual recognition of the degrees and diplomas awarded by member countries. Quality-assurance is inevitably a prerequisite to international recognition.

Since the early 1990s, new organizations have created international forums where national quality-assurance agencies can pursue agreements and collaborations. The International Network for Quality-assurance Agencies in Higher Education (INQAAHE) brings together national agencies and members of regional organizations into a larger organization with a broader international reach for similar purposes.

In addition, INQAAHE contributes to the development of accrediting agencies in a number of ways, including disseminating information about "good practice" in quality-assurance, providing training materials, and by facilitating the sharing of information and experience internationally.

 In addition, new supranational agencies are engaging in accreditation activities in different countries. The European Quality Improvement Scheme (EQUIS) is an example of this. EQUIS accredits business and management programs throughout the world, creating a single measure of quality for programs in this area.

 Clearly, when local accreditation provides international validity important benefits are received by many sectors. Although much international activity and discussion are taking place and accelerating at great speed, the agreements being made and considered are all based on whether participants can be confident of shared vocabulary, shared values, and shared objectives. Currently, the discussion tends toward "we will recognize what you recognize." With the ambiguity that hangs over the understanding of quality and standards in higher education, the process of mutual recognition seems to rest on a house of cards.

 Conclusion

 The discussion of quality will always be complicated by the lack of consensus about what quality means in higher education. Many attempts have been made to define it; most of the literature acknowledges the elusiveness of a useful definition. Quality is often confused with a competitive position in the marketplace, star faculty, and prestige. Quality, to a large degree, remains in the eye of the beholder, and different perspectives will respond to different measures of it.

UNESCO's compiled glossary is an important attempt to align the shared vocabulary of quality. For the short term, the same words and phrases will continue to be understood differently by various actors, with, in some cases, agreements signed on the basis of misunderstandings about those meanings. Regional agreements have been signed that recognize degrees as comparable as long as they are "accredited" in the country where they were awarded, without fully exploring the ways in which accreditation might be conducted or whether it fully meets the needs of all parties.

 The diversity of higher education has made the problem even more complicated. Because quality is expected regarding all higher education institutions, quality-assurance programs must accommodate the enormous range of missions and resources that these institutions now represent-nationally and internationally. The question remains as to how usefully the same criteria can be applied to this growing diversity. Much care needs to be exercised before standards are applied from one country to the performance of another, a trend evident as national accrediting bodies are beginning to validate programs and institutions beyond their borders.

 It needs to be known that faculty credentials, research, student/faculty ratios, institutional facilities and other factors can be easily documented. Learning about the performance of academic institutions and programs seems to defy easy measurement. There are too many variables that cannot be quantified. Often numerous variables combine to produce results making measurement even more difficult. Different institutions operate within the constraints of realities that must be factored in to the way their activities are assessed. Certain conventions have been achieved but no one seems entirely satisfied with them.

 There are national, regional, and increasingly international agencies that provide oversight to quality-assurance processes. In most cases, these organizations rely on standards and/or criteria that reflect input as the basis of quality assessment, although there is increasing attention to outcomes. The oversight that these intermediary organizations can provide is limited. In the end, external agencies only guarantee some degree of attentiveness to quality. The critical work of quality-assurance and quality improvement must be conducted locally. Essential to success is "encouraging colleges and universities to become 'selfdeveloping' organizations-institutions continually seeking improvement in their teaching and learning processes" .

 As a result of the implementation of so many new quality-assurance schemes, quality is now a part of institutional management and planning everywhere. There is still limited research on the outcomes of all of the increased attention to quality . At the very least, institutions now do a better job of collecting information and data. All of this evaluation is producing a lot of reports and making the internal activity of higher education a little more transparent. The quality of institutional management is certainly better as a result.

 Likewise, more attention is needed to be focused on teaching and learning, the impact of post secondary study on students, and the relevance of academic programs to a globalized socioeconomic environment. More attention is needed on whether the incentives and rewards distributed within higher education contribute to the greater quality of its principle activities.

 The key issue left unresolved is what purpose all of this attention to quality is meant to serve. Is quality-assurance or quality improvement being pursued? Has it been demonstrated that standards, whatever they mean, are being met or that performance is improving ? Many quality- assurance schemes attempt to do both. Yet, without the ability to define what quality is, perhaps the best policy is to engage in an ongoing process of improvement.

 Although "globalization" and the resulting mobility of individuals, institutions, and activities underscore the growing importance of international benchmarks and standards for higher education, quality management has to remain a largely local endeavor. Context and culture are important factors in the consideration of quality. External agencies have provided an important impetus, ensuring that the pursuit of quality remains at the top of the higher education agenda. To receive benefits from the many evaluations now taking place, a broad range of participants within each higher education institution needs to recognize value in the process and participate in earnest. Quality-assurance is truly more of a process than a result and requires the cultivation of institutional cultures where all actors are open to self-criticism and attentive to opportunities for improvement.

THANKS

sudhanshu