Nuevas tendencias en políticas de garantía de calidad en la educación superior

Abstract

Higher education in Europe is undergoing a period of major transformations. Everywhere, emphasis is being placed on achieving the most crucial objectives of all : the construction of a common European Higher Education Area (EHEA). The EHEA constitutes a decisive step in the commercialization of higher education. In this context, quality assurance has a central role to play, being as it is at the intersection of current transformations. More in particular, the emergence of accreditation as the dominant objective of national policies for quality assurance in higher education can be understood as a crucial moment in the process of commercialization. The paper underlines this evolution by discussing recent evolutions in the domain quality assurance in higher education and stressing a number of potential risks and nega tive prospects. It offers a reflection organized around three main poles: quality assurance in higher education; the relationships with the process of commercialization and the actual use of the information that be collected through the many existing instruments for quality assurance. The paper strongly argues that a decisive shift has taken place since the late- 1990s that as replace formative purposes of quality assurance with summative ones