Problems of accreditation and quality assurance of engineering education in developing countries

Abstract

The relationships between funding, management and quality assurance of engineering education in developing countries are discussed in this paper. It is proposed to raise the debate on engineering education up to the global economic level and to examine some of the issues facing developing and poorer countries in managing and improving the quality of engineering education in their countries. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world is now divided in two realigned blocks: one of developed (rich or advanced) countries that have a social security safety net for their population and another of developing (or poor) countries that have no such luxuries for their population. For the general public in the developing countries, any engineering degree is a passport to lifelong well-being of an individual and his/her extended family.Therefore, the demand for such qualifications is very high and it is almost a rat race amongst school graduates to get into engineering/technical colleges. In view of this booming demand, there are hundreds of privately funded engineering/technical colleges in countries like the Philippines, India, Thailand, etc. besides state-funded ones. It is extremely difficult to ensure good quality in this mushrooming scenario. There are also many very small poorresource developing countries where there is only one engineering school and/or two to three technical colleges. Products of these schools/colleges work only in their own country and educational globalization has little or no meaning for them. Besides highlighting the aforementioned general issues, the paper also presents a few case studies on problems of accreditation and quality assessment in larger developing countries such as India and the Philippines and also in very small developing countries such as Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Arab countries.