Effects of Quality Assessment in Dutch Higher Education

Abstract

Quality management [1] has been an issue in Dutch higher education since the 1980s. Quality assessment (QA) of education was introduced on the political agenda as part of the new policy of the government, with the policy paper Higher Education: Autonomy and Quality (1985). In exchange for a larger measure of administrative autonomy, the universities promised to retain and enhance their levels of quality in education. Quality assessment then appeared on a systematic and nationwide scale in 1988, when the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) implemented its new responsibility. The VSNU QA system consists of an external Visiting Committee (VC) for each discipline or cluster of study programmes [2] operating nationwide. To prepare for the VC, those responsible for each study programme are required to write a self-evaluation (we will take 'self-evaluation' and 'self-study' to be synonyms). When the VC has visited all study programmes in its 'area', it writes a report based on the self-evaluations that were its input and on the experience of the visits to the locations. These visits usually last for two intensive days, during which the VC talks to representatives of all actors involved in the study programme (including students) and at the end of which, based on the self-evaluation and the impressions of the visit, a preliminary comment and judgment about the study programme is given by the chair. This text, after being commented on by the study programme, is included in the report of the visiting committee. The comments, recommendations and judgments about the individual study programmes are preceded in the report by a chapter on the general 'state of the art', shared problems and so on in the discipline covered. The self-evaluations and the report by the VC are the key documents in this quality spiral, of which the second cycle is starting in 1994. In 1990 a parallel system of QA was introduced by the VSNU counterpart, the HBO Council, for the non-university sector. The VC's judgments and self-evaluations are intended, in the first place, to enhance the quality of the study programme; accountability to the government and society in general is only the second goal (Vroeijenstijn & Acherman, 1990). This raises the question of to what extent the results of the evaluations are really utilised. Commissioned by the Ministry of Education and Science, in parallel with a 'mid-term review' by the Inspectorate of Higher Education (1992), the authors started a research project, the central question of which can be formulated briefly as: What are the effects of the QA system on the quality activities of higher education institutions? This project was not intended as an evaluation of the evaluation system 181