Greece Before the Bologna Process: Confronting or Embracing Quality Assurance in Higher Education?

Abstract

The globalization of education, with its multiple associations with the growth of the knowledge society, the increasing penetration of market forces in higher education and the treatment of education as an exportable good, supplied in different forms and by various providers, exerts the need for systematic quality assurance in higher education. In Europe, the Bologna Process has urged member-states to respond quickly to the impact of globalization by facilitating tertiary assessment mechanisms to make European education attractive to foreign ‘consumers’ and at the same time to prevent academic migration to the USA. At present, Greece is among those member-states lacking some type of formal tertiary evaluation. The paper examines socio-political and economic conditions in which hostility towards quality assurance has developed. It discusses the prospects of Greece's converging towards the quality goals of the European Higher Education Area. This case goes beyond the limits of a strictly technical debate about the implementation of evaluation procedures or what its criteria ought to be, with the purpose of presenting the broader socio-political and economic background that influences the enactment and operation of quality assurance in Greece.