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INTERNATIONAL HIGHER EDUCATION

The Growing Accountability Agenda: Progress or Mixed Blessing?

Jamil Salmi
Jamil Salmi is the tertiary education coordinator of the World Bank, Washington, DC, USA. E-mail: jsalmi@worldbank.org.

Compared to the well-established tradition of accreditation in the United States, public universities in many countries have typically operated in a very autonomous manner. In the francophone countries of Africa, for example, institutions enjoy full independence in the selection (election) of their leaders and complete management autonomy. They do not have to answer for their inefficient performance. In several Latin American countries, the constitution entitles public universities to a fixed percentage of the annual budget that they are free to use without accountability. Some countries do not even have a government ministry or agency responsible for steering or supervising the tertiary education sector.

In the past decade, however, accountability has become a major concern in most parts of the world. Governments, parliaments, and society at large are increasingly asking universities to justify the use of public resources and account more thoroughly for their teaching and research results. This undertaking may include many forms: legal requirements such as licensing, accreditation, assessment tests to measure what students have learned; professional examinations; performance-based budget allocation; and governing boards with external participants. Sometimes the press itself enters the accountability arena with its controversial league tables.

The Accountability Agenda
Nobody can argue that universities should not be accountable. First, governments are responsible for establishing a regulatory framework to prevent fraudulent practices. Accusations of flawed medical research in the United Kingdom, reports of Australian universities cutting corners to attract foreign students, and the student loan scandal in the United States show the need for vigilance, even in countries with strong accountability mechanisms. Second, universities should legitimately be held accountable for their use of public money and the quality of their outputs (graduates, research, and regional engagement). The evolution toward increased accountability is reflected in the expansion in the number of stakeholders, themes under scrutiny, and channels of accountability.

The teaching staff has traditionally been the most powerful group in universities, especially where the head of the institution is democratically elected. Even at Harvard, the demise of President Summers in 2006 was largely due to the opposition of some professors. But today university leaders must at the same time meet the competing demands of several groups of stakeholders: (a) society at large; (b) government, which can be national, provincial, or municipal; (c) employers; (d) the teaching staff; and (e) the students themselves. Even within government structures, demands for accountability are coming from new actors—as has happened in Denmark, where responsibility for the universities' sector is now with the Ministry of Technology.

The pressure for compliance comes through an increasingly broad variety of instruments. Government controls take the form of compulsory requirements, such as accreditation, performance indicators, and mandatory financial audits. They can also operate indirectly through financial incentives such as performance-based budget allocation. In countries with a student loan system, these loans are usually available only for studies in bona fide institutions. Innovative funding approaches—such as the voucher systems recently established in the state of Colorado and in several former Soviet Union republics or the contracting of places in private universities piloted in Brazil and Colombia—put the decision making on where to study in the hands of the students themselves. Establishing university boards with outside members who have the power to hire (and fire) the leader of the institution, as has recently happened in Denmark, is another accountability channel. In many countries, accreditation reports are made available to the public, unlike the practice in the United States.

Public Opinion
Colombia was the first country in Latin America to set up a national accreditation system, but the number of programs reviewed by the new accreditation agency remained relatively low because accreditation was voluntary and the most prestigious universities did not feel any compulsion to participate. But after the country's main newspaper started to publish the full list of accredited programs, many more universities joined the accreditation process out of fear of being shunned by the students. In the same vein, the Intel Corporation announced in August 2007 that due to quality concerns it was removing more than 100 US universities and colleges from the list of eligible institutions where its employees could study, for retraining, at the firm's expense.

The power of public opinion has been revealed in the growing influence of rankings. Initially limited to the United States, university rankings and league tables have proliferated in recent years, in more than 35 countries. Notwithstanding the methodological limitations of these rankings, the mass media have played a useful educational role by making relevant information available to the public, especially in countries lacking any form of quality assurance. In Japan, for instance, for many years the annual ranking published by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper fulfilled an essential quality-assurance function in the absence of an accreditation agency.

The Accountability Crisis
In recent years, grievances about excessive accountability requirements and their negative consequences have come from many quarters. In the United Kingdom and Australia, for example, universities have complained of performance-indicator overload. In the United States, a controversy arose recently around the recommendations of the US Department of Education Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education regarding the need to measure learning outcomes. This reaction illustrates the weariness of the tertiary education community vis-à-vis accountability demands beyond accreditation. Another common complaint concerns the tyranny of the rankings published by the press.

In developing and transition countries, university leaders may accuse government of mixing accountability with excessive control. Comparing recent trends in two former Soviet Union republics, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, helps to illustrate practices that may stifle the tertiary education sector. In 2001, Kazakhstan introduced a voucher-like allocation system to distribute public resources for tertiary education. About 20 percent of the students receive education grants to study at the public or private institution of their choice. To be eligible, institutions must have received a positive evaluation from the quality-assurance unit of the Ministry of Education. As a result, all tertiary education institutions have become more mindful of their reputation as it determines their ability to attract education grant beneficiaries. In Azerbaijan, by contrast, the Ministry of Education controls student intake and program openings, even at private universities. Thus, for the more dynamic tertiary education institutions it becomes extremely difficult to innovate and expand.

Even in the absence of unethical behaviors, institutions may succumb to the natural temptation to pay more attention to those factors that receive prominence in rankings. In the United States and Canada there have been rumors of universities and colleges "doctoring" their statistics to improve their standing in the rankings.

Accountability often involves the need to reconcile multiple objectives, some of which are incompatible. For example, the pursuit of equity may be defeated by high admissions requirements—especially in countries like Brazil, with socially segregated secondary schools. While the proportion of low-income families is 57 percent in the state of São Paulo, it is only 10 percent at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), one of the country's top universities.

On the positive side, however, many university leaders seek to make their institutions more accountable on a voluntary basis. In the United States, for example, the same presidents who decided in 2007 to boycott the US News and World Report rankings announced that they would start publishing key performance indicators in the context of a Voluntary System of Accountability Program. In Belgium, the Flemish universities have voluntarily joined the German ranking exercise for benchmarking purposes. In France, ironically, when the government in July 2007 offered increased autonomy against more accountability on a voluntary basis, there was a unanimous outcry. The scope of proposed autonomy was then reduced but imposed on all universities.

The Way Forward
The universal push for increased accountability has made the role of university leaders much more demanding. This irreversible evolution toward greater accountability has transformed the competencies expected of university leaders and the ensuing capacity-building needs of university management teams.

Accountability is meaningful only to the extent that tertiary education institutions are actually empowered to operate in an autonomous and responsible way. In the final analysis, their successful evolution will hinge on finding an appropriate balance between credible accountability practices and favorable autonomy conditions.

Author's note: The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this article are entirely those of the author and should not be attributed in any manner to the World Bank, the members of its Board of Executive Directors, or the countries they represent.

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