Higher Education Newsletter

 

03/18/2002
Reading Time: 3-5 minutes

Number 17
ACCREDITATION POLICIES

In recent decades, university policies have been conditioned by the need to introduce the concept of Accountability . This new philosophy, which has now appeared throughout the public sector, has modified the idea of university autonomy and introduced the need for evaluating policies in the higher education area.
National evaluation plans and the quality system have been introduced with the aim of improving the service that universities offer to society. However, diversification in the university system and the progressive internationalisation of the higher education space require both official approval of qualifications and accreditation of studies. These needs are highlighted in the Bologna Declaration
(http://www.universia.es/contenidos/universidades/documentos/Universidades_docum_bolonia.htm).
The aim of the accreditation system is to detect whether any university is below the required quality standard. Accreditation means conceding to higher education institutions the right to award degrees of comparable quality according to criteria that take into account the knowledge acquired and professional competence.

The United States has a long tradition of accreditation going back more than a hundred years. The objective is to achieve an improvement in university quality by way of providing quality guarantees and complementing the institutions' internal evaluations with external checks. Higher education institutions study their own performances with the aim of improving quality and are then visited by external experts who produce a final report. In this second phase, the part played by regional or thematic accreditation agencies is very important.
We recommend a visit to the accreditation section of the Office of Post-Secondary Education website which shows all the regulations concerned along with an account of the country's accreditation agencies, both regional and thematic. http://www.ed.gov/offices/OPE/accreditation/accredus.html

The European Commission has made a commitment to take steps towards recognising professional qualifications in countries belonging to the European Union.http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/education/rec_qual_en.html). The most significant step is the document Towards Accreditation Schemes for Higher Education in Europe? which was published in May 2001 as the result of a CRE (European Rectors' Conference) project and applied in the Socrates programme as a complementary measure (http://www.unige.ch/cre/activities/accreditation/accreditation_home.htm).
The European Commission's Leonardo programme was created to facilitate job finding, to improve the quality of and access to training and to contribute towards innovation in vocational training. The programme's second phase, initiated in 2000, saw the promotion of the project to create a European agency for accreditation of engineering studies.http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/education/leonardo/leonardo2_en.html).
Within Europe, there has been a gradual promotion of initiatives such as the European Euroguidance network (http://www.euroguidance.org.uk/), the European accreditation organism, the European Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (http://www.enqa.net/index.html) along with national agencies which continue to be those mainly responsible for advancing accreditation mechanisms in higher education institutions.http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/education/leonardo/leonardo2/naweb_en.html).

One interesting case is that of the University of Delft in The Netherlands which, on the basis of a system of quality evaluation, has been working on international accreditation mechanisms for its programmes.http://www.tudelft.nl/matrix/home.cfm?usertype=english). The University of Delft is presently accredited in the United States by the agency ABET (http://www.abet.org/)

Other international accreditation experiences are those of voluntary networks established between universities. There is an increasing tendency towards this type of accreditation between universities as well as new degrees and diplomas. Such is the case of the European Consortium of Innovative Universities (http://www.eciu.org/) which was created by eleven European universities with the aims of sharing their more innovative experiences and constructing an Entrepreneurial University.

By M. Àngels Cortina Cunill, Global University Network for Innovation (GUNI)

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©The Higher Education Newsletter is made by the Conference of Spanish University Rectors and the Global University Network for Innovation, in cooperation with UNESCO Chair of Higher Education Management.