Higher Education Quality Assurance in a Changing World

With the rapid expansion of higher education institutions throughout the world and education’s increasingly market-based orientation, students, parents, higher educators, employers and governments have a much greater interest in the actual academic quality of universities and colleges in various dimensions in the era of globalization. Universities and colleges are definitely beginning to take on accountability toward related members of the school and societies in the same way that private enterprise does. In this way, universities are supposed to act as an effective organizer and a good learner on how to improve their quality, particularly in research and teaching quality, through several assessment tools. Hence, a major concern for Asian governments is how to assure quality in higher education and how to enhance global competitiveness through a variety of national policies and institutional engagement. As a result, quality assurance mechanisms, which emphasize output monitoring and measurements and systems of accountability and auditing, have become more popular in Asian and other regions.