International Higher Education, Summer 2004

The Opportunity Cost of the Pursuit of International Quality Standards

Judith S. Eaton
Judith S. Eaton is president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA). Address: CHEA, One Dupont Circle, Room 510, Washington DC 20036, USA. E-mail: chea@chea.org.

During the last several years, spurred in part by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the current round of negotiations of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), efforts to establish a single set of international standards for higher education quality have picked up considerably. WTO/GATS sets the stage for attention to international standards by (1) including higher education as a “service” to be regulated for purposes of trade and (2) calling for “liberalizing” (expanding) trade in higher education by removing restrictions to market access and barriers to competition.

GATS does not specifically call for international quality standards for higher education as part of a trade regime. However, two multinational organizations--the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)--in part reacting to GATS, are developing government-based international quality standards on the premise that these standards are essential to colleges and universities seeking to be full participants in a global society. Their efforts build on earlier work undertaken by, for example, the International Association of University Presidents (IAUP) to establish a “Worldwide Quality Register”--a means to scrutinize accreditation and quality assurance organizations based on a set of quality standards.

Two Major Efforts to Establish International Quality Standards
UNESCO, through its Global Forum on International Quality Assurance, Accreditation and Recognition of Qualifications, has developed a Global Forum Action Plan that would include an “education regulatory framework” for higher education quality, perhaps through updating and expanding the various UNESCO conventions to operate as “educational agreements providing international standards in the context of the growing liberalization of trade in services.” The plan also calls for development of national and regional quality assurance capacity, information tools for students, and sustainable development of higher education systems.

OECD has joined forces with UNESCO to establish an international database of reliable or “recognized” higher education institutions. OECD also seeks to develop nonbinding guidelines for cross-border higher education, intended to provide student protection, to assure clarity of information and to encourage accreditation and quality assurance cooperation among countries. The guidelines may address higher education institutions, quality assurance and accreditation organizations, recognition and credential evaluation agencies, and professional bodies.

The likely outcome of these efforts remains to be seen. Government-based solutions to international quality issues are attractive to some countries as they expand their international higher education activity. And, if there is to be international regulation of higher education quality, a number of countries prefer that this take place outside WTO/GATS. The key actors, UNESCO and OECD, are large, complex organizations with diverse constituents, and arriving at consensus will be time consuming. And, given the diverse constituencies, there is the risk that “success” may be a paper tiger: vaguely worded standards of quality that are not sufficiently robust to build trust and confidence in their reliability.

Moreover, these efforts take place in a complex environment of other--perhaps competing--efforts at standard setting driven by geographic area, mode of educational delivery, or the traditions of individual countries. Europe is engaged in a major effort, based on the Bologna Declaration, to develop regional quality standards for higher education. There are discussions of regional quality initiatives--for example, in Latin America and the Gulf states. The International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE), based in Norway, has developed international quality standards for distance learning. In the United States, with its long tradition of institutional autonomy, academic freedom and self regulation of academic quality through private accreditation bodies, many people remain concerned that international quality standards may erode these traditions so vital to the success of U.S. higher education. How might these alternative efforts and traditions be reconciled--or at least coexist?

Opportunity Costs
Whether or not these efforts to establish international quality standards can succeed, there are significant opportunity costs associated with their pursuit. By creating an environment where attention to higher education quality in an international setting is defined almost exclusively by a debate about a single set of standards, the key actors, however inadvertently, draw energy away from other vital quality issues.

The first opportunity cost relates to developing countries. Focus on international standards appears to be at the price of the key actors giving enough priority to the needs of individual countries. At a recent OECD/UNESCO meeting in Paris, those assembled were told that at least 40 percent of UNESCO member nations lacked a reliable quality assurance capacity. How can individual countries benefit from international standards in the absence of a robust national capacity? To the contrary, they may be harmed. Absent individual nations in a position to assert their own values and culture through their own quality assurance enterprise, the development of international standards may be dominated by more developed countries, perhaps choking off the traditions of countries that enjoy fewer resources. Although the UNESCO plan acknowledges this need, it is not clear that addressing it is a priority.

The second opportunity cost relates to higher education institutions. The focus on international standards as a government activity appears to be at the price of the key actors providing vital support to the development of a strong international voice for higher education institutions worldwide. UNESCO and OECD, organizations of governments, at least thus far, prefer working outside the ambit of higher education and, for the most part, do not engage institutional leaders, policymakers, and academics in their deliberations. Yet, colleges and universities are among the oldest “international” institutions in the world, and their advice about whether to undertake international quality standards might be quite useful. The development of international standards in the absence of the academic community raises fundamental questions about whether such standards will ever be taken seriously--unless they are forced on institutions by government.

The third opportunity cost relates to other initiatives that these actors might undertake if they were not focusing on international quality standards--initiatives that might provide greater added value than the debate about international standards. One conspicuous example is attention to the worldwide flourishing of dubious providers of higher education: “degree mills” and “accreditation mills.” An international dialogue and frame of reference to address shoddy higher education in an international setting are badly needed. It is difficult for any single country to address this. Legal constraints are one factor here and technology is another--distance delivery of degree mills cannot be effectively addressed by a single country. The key actors would help all of higher education by working with institutions and accreditation/quality assurance organizations around the world to develop means to (1) identify rogue providers, (2) develop tools to aid students and the public in distinguishing between rogue and reliable providers, and (3) explore effective practices to discourage rogue providers.

Conclusion
The multinational actors described here are devoting significant energy to creating international quality standards for higher education. While it is too soon to determine whether these efforts will be successful, it is not too soon to acknowledge that there are significant opportunity costs associated with these efforts. Important quality-related issues that these actors could profitably address are receiving little, if any, attention. These include aiding developing countries in building national quality assurance capacity, contributing to the creation of a strong international voice for academic institutions about higher education quality, and addressing such pressing issues in the international environment as identification of degree mills and accreditation mills.