ISSN 1753-9439 Paper 4 Vol 1 No 1 Pages 122 – 138
The move toward standardisation: Quality and accountability in European and American Higher Education
The increasingly competitive environment of higher education has served to highlight particular deficiencies in academic quality and institutional accountability both in the US and Europe. Both Europe and American higher education have called for reforms that include some degree of standardisation and quality control. This paper utilizes the qualitative method of content analysis using public documents in order to identify and compare the major reform documentation produced between 1999 and 2006 in European and American higher education thus bridging the information gap between the US and other systems of higher education and providing international educators, researchers, and policy makers with an initial analysis and synthesis of the published objectives of what appear to be very similar methods for addressing higher education reform. The findings of the present study identify similarities between national reform efforts in America and Europe and emphasise that the global economy requires our educational mechanisms to be efficient, accountable, and unified in order to promote student access, mobility and ultimately, success.