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Designing the framework conditions for assuring academic standards: lessons learned about professional, market, and government regulation of academic quality

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Abstract

The new demands of mass systems of higher education and the emerging environment of global academic competition are altering the traditional institutions for assuring academic standards in universities. As a consequence many nations are experimenting with new instruments for academic quality assurance. Contemporary government control of academic quality assumes three primary forms: “oversight” or direct regulation; “competition” or steering of market forces; and “mutuality” or professional self-regulation structured by the state. The challenge confronting all nations is to design a policy framework that effectively balances the forces of the state, the market, and the academic profession to assure academic standards in universities. Based upon the strengths and weaknesses observed in 14 policy analyses of innovative national instruments of professional self-regulation, market-based regulation, and direct state regulation for assuring academic quality in universities, we outline the essential components of a national framework for assuring academic standards.

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Notes

  1. The protocol used to guide the policy analyses of the selected innovative instruments of quality assurance is available from the senior author.

  2. Hood’s classification of contemporary government controls is similar to the classic “triangle” of forces coordinating higher education articulated by Clark (1983), i.e., state, market, and academic oligarchy.

  3. While the Measuring Up report cards (Breneman 2010), designed to inform policymakers on the relative performance of state higher education systems in the US, similarly have thus far had little direct influence on academic standards, they have encouraged greater attention of policy makers to the measurement of the “educational capital” of states as a whole and increased US interest in the current OECD (2009) project for an international assessment of higher education learning outcomes.

  4. There are a number of important methodological issues that would need to be addressed in such a policy (Dill and Soo 2005). For example, assuring the validity and reliability of student progression information reported by institutions as well as the graduate outcomes reported in alumni surveys, addressing the limitations of differential response rates by field in alumni surveys, the fact that graduate salaries may reflect regional differences in labor markets more than university differences, etc. Nonetheless, despite these limitations, the relevance of information on student progression and graduate outcomes by field to effective student choice warrants serious consideration of a policy that provides these data.

  5. The most recent NRC rankings reflect a number of the points made above regarding the design of more effective information-based policies for academic quality assurance (Ostriker et al. 2011). A major goal of these redesigned rankings was to promote university discussion of means of managing and strengthening research doctoral programs. Consequently the rankings endeavored to define and validate a new, national set of measures of faculty quality, student experiences, and research productivity that each institution could use to benchmark and continually improve the quality and effectiveness of its doctoral programs.

  6. Policymakers may understandably question whether external assessments that promote greater collegial discussion among academic staff about improving academic standards are of significant public benefit. But both laboratory and field research suggests that face to face communication in social dilemmas is the most effective means of producing substantial increases in needed cooperation and coordination over time (Ostrom and Walker 1997). Departmental meetings about assuring program quality, information exchanges with respected peers from other departments about means of improving educational activities, and face-to-face collegial performance reviews regarding the quality of teaching and student learning in an academic program appear to promote the social ties necessary for the more effective observation, communication, and enforcement of academic standards (Dill and Beerkens 2010).

  7. The issue of reviewing academic subjects as part of university academic audits has been a particularly contentious issue in the UK, but the failure to study the effects on academic programs of an institution’s quality assurance processes compromises the efficacy of external audits. Logically the only valid means for assessing the effectiveness of teaching or instruction is to evaluate its impact upon student learning. Similarly, the only valid means of evaluating the effectiveness of a university’s processes for assuring academic standards is to investigate their impact upon and the responses by academic subjects or programs.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to express our appreciation for the suggestions of Roger Brown, Stephanie Schmitt, and several anonymous journal reviewers.

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  1. Department of Public Policy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Abernethy Hall, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599-3435, USA

    David D. Dill

  2. Department of Public Administration, Leiden University, Postbus 9555, 2300 RB, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Maarja Beerkens

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Correspondence to David D. Dill.

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Dill, D.D., Beerkens, M. Designing the framework conditions for assuring academic standards: lessons learned about professional, market, and government regulation of academic quality. High Educ 65, 341–357 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-012-9548-x

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