I was chatting yesterday with a classmate during our weekly dissertation lunches (an informal study group we formed to motivate ourselves so that the summer doesn’t turn out to be a complete waste), and we turned to the topic of ‘quality’ assurance in higher education in Asia. She described growing efforts to implement mechanisms such as formal rankings and certification processes in order to improve the often dismal quality of education in Asian universities. That sounds good – but the question, of course, is whether or not such mechanisms really are effective in improving quality. Some higher education institutions – typically those favored by the state and/or social elites, and therefore comparatively resource-rich – already have a ‘reputation’ for quality or are undertaking efforts on their own to improve their educational standards and offerings. Does it make sense, then, for the state or other external agencies to present them with a list of criteria or standards that define ‘quality’ for them, especially when these standards often mimic those applied in the developed world (number of publications, prestige rankings, etc.) but seem otherwise irrelevant or inappropriate to local needs and contexts?
I don’t really have an answer to these questions – although even here in the U.S., efforts to define and measure quality ‘objectively’ in the context of education (higher or otherwise) are controversial too. What piqued my interest, however, is the issue of ‘reputation.’ The desire to achieve a reputation for ‘quality’ is considerable across different educational contexts, but it’s not always clear what the effects of this are on actual quality itself. On the one hand, I would imagine that a reputation for quality might instill a sort of internal discipline: an ‘organizational striving’ to preserve existing quality and if possible to improve upon it. Requiring faculty to publish or secure research grants, making admissions standards more exclusive, recruiting ‘stars’ aggressively, and so on would be among these. On the other hand, in certain circumstances a reputation for quality might also permit a certain laxity, in that an institution or one of its components (say, an individual department) might draw upon or coast off of its reputation, leading to a certain presumption and lack of self-inspection or self-awareness about whether or not it truly offers a ‘quality’ education. This doesn’t prevent, of course, from members of that institution benefiting from its reputation, much like the graduate from a prestigious university getting a job on the basis of his or her credential alone. But the fact that this takes place on a routine basis isn’t what’s important if one takes quality seriously.
I know this is all pretty basic stuff and there’s probably a discussion of these matters somewhere in the literature (I’m too lazy to look). But I thought it interesting that from the same root – reputation –both a sense of discipline and a kind of latitude (to borrow a distinction formulated by Albert Hirschman) might emerge within a single institution, in different combinations or contexts, with different ‘phenomenological’ results. It’s hardly unusual to find students at elite institutions complaining of feeling the need to ‘work really hard,’ but puzzling at the ‘lack of guidance’ or ‘expectations’ placed upon them. Or, conversely, of being confronted with all kinds of rigorously-applied (or ritualistically upheld) ‘standards’ and ‘expectations’ that don’t seem to be accompanied by a comparable institutional interest in promoting quality teaching or ensuring genuine learning. This is the kind of puzzle that came into mind, at any rate.
