The Regulation of Standards in Higher Education

Abstract

The regulation of standards in higher education is a complex area of scholarship that intersects with several established and emergent fields including quality assurance, regulation, and legal theory, public policy, accreditation, audit, academic standards, transnational education, and the scholarship of higher education policy more generally. A dynamic and diverse area of scholarship, the literature focusing on the regulation of standards in higher education often reflects regional specific contexts, changing policy environments, and evolving debates relating to academic standards in the increasingly global, diverse, and mass higher education industry. The complexity of this area of scholarship is reflective of diverse and non-uniform practice across and within nation-states, and of new forms of regulation stimulated by the technologically enabled and global provision of higher education. For example, in some nations academic standards may be wholly the responsibility of internal institutional quality assurance processes, while elsewhere meeting externally imposed academic standards from state, federal, or independent agencies may be a condition of registration or have funding implications. There are a number of key works and authors who have influenced and propelled the scholarship around the regulation of standards in higher education since the 1990s. Primarily these works have origins in nations where the regulation of higher education has been aligned to national or regional public policy reform such as the United Kingdom (King) and the United States (Dill, Ewell), and more recently Australia (Baird). It is not surprising, therefore, that where regulatory frameworks exist for assuring standards in higher education, scholarship surrounding this area has flourished. It is important too, to recognize the emerging scholarship from regions where the regulation of standards in higher education is a relatively new concept including in Asia. This review provides a regional-specific section that captures the individual contexts of higher education regulation and quality assurance frameworks. The inclusion of texts that reflect the considerable challenges surrounding the regulation of standards in higher education signal the contested terrain of this area of scholarship and the implications for future research.