Juan Felipe Duque, part-time lecturer at Sciences Po Grenoble and doctoral student at UMR Pacte
Once seen as ivory towers relatively isolated from the rest of the world, over the past forty years or so, universities and, more broadly, higher education institutions have become increasingly closely linked to their economic, political and social environment. This embedding of higher education in society has led to the emergence of new regulatory instruments designed to control and improve the quality of institutions and the academic programs they offer. It was against this backdrop that quality assurance - an expression used in the scientific literature to designate new performance assessment practices and institutional self-regulation mechanisms - burst onto the scene in the early 1990s, and gradually established itself as the bedrock of a regulatory regime that is often described as neo-managerial.
Research on the characteristics and introduction of quality assurance instruments has tended to neglect the evolution of these mechanisms, as well as the uses and unexpected effects they produce. Following a qualitative and comparative approach, the article summarized in this post combines public policy analysis and the neo-institutional theory of change with the aim of tracing the trajectories of Chilean and Colombian quality assurance policies in higher education.
Deceptive instrumental and contextual similarities
In the two countries studied, quality assurance policies are structured around relatively similar instruments and procedures. In Chile, the policy relies on two mechanisms: licenciamiento (a compulsory mechanism for monitoring the minimum quality requirements of new private institutions) and quality accreditation (voluntary evaluation of institutions and programs, leading to quality certification whose duration - 2 to 7 years - reflects the degree of compliance with criteria predefined by the National Accreditation Commission). Colombia's quality assurance policy is based on three main instruments: registro calificado (certification of compliance with minimum quality standards, which institutions and programs must renew every 7 years), high quality accreditation (a label awarded for a period of 4 to 6 years to institutions and programs that undergo the voluntary evaluation coordinated by the National Accreditation Board) and, since 2010, Saber Pro exams (compulsory exams for students completing the bachelor's degree course).
In addition to the similarities in their instruments, these two public policies operate in contexts that are also similar insofar as the Chilean and Colombian higher education systems are characterized by a high degree of privatization. A quick look at some statistical data will highlight the absolutely colossal weight of the private sector in Chile and Colombia: private institutions account for 88% and 72% respectively of the total number of establishments in the sector, and the percentage of students enrolled in the private sector is 84% in the former case and 49% in the latter. It should also be noted that, with a private funding rate equal to 68% in the case of Chile and 64% in the case of Colombia, these two countries are among the top 5 OECD countries with the highest share of private funding of higher education.
Behind these similarities, however, lie highly contrasting uses and effects of quality assurance. Indeed, it seems that Chilean policy is characterized by a flexible approach to quality, while Colombian policy is distinguished by its focus on excellence. While the Colombian higher education system is almost twice the size of its Chilean counterpart in terms of institutions and students, the proportion of accredited programs and institutions is three times higher in Chile than in Colombia: in 2019, for example, 60% of Chilean higher education institutions were accredited, compared with just 20% of Colombian institutions. How can we explain this difference between two policies that appear similar at first glance?
Contrasting trends in public action programs at the heart at the heart of quality assurance policies
The article shows that both policies were initially developed by quality assurance elites who shared two key characteristics. The first is the homogeneity of the professional backgrounds of the people who joined them. In Chile, these were experts attached to independent research centers who, at the time of the democratic transition in 1990, introduced into the political arena the proposals they had developed in academic spaces during the military dictatorship. In Colombia, the collective that introduced the first quality assurance instruments was made up of teacher-researchers from elite universities with extensive experience in institutional management bodies and sectoral steering.
The second characteristic is the coherence of the public policy agenda championed by these elites. In both cases, quality assurance was part of a broader vision for the organization of the higher education system. The Chilean elite saw quality assurance as a means of strengthening regulation in a sector increasingly dominated by private provision: the introduction of licenciamiento thus reflected their desire to regulate more closely a market that had grown out of control. For their part, the Colombian elite saw quality assurance as a form of regulation more respectful of institutional autonomy, based on incentives rather than legal constraints: from this perspective, high-quality accreditation represented public recognition that should encourage institutions to strive for academic excellence.
These two public action programs, which served as roadmaps for quality assurance policies during the 1990s, have been undergoing contrasting developments since the second half of the 2000s. The gradual exclusion of the Chilean elite from the institutions in charge of steering quality assurance policy and, above all, the growing interdependence between the instruments of this policy and the new indirect public funding arrangements for private institutions, have resulted in an excessive flexibilization of the criteria for accreditation quality standards. The Colombian elite, for its part, has benefited from the support of elite universities to maintain its influence over quality assurance agencies. In so doing, it has ensured the relative stability of its public policy agenda. The difference between the two policies' approaches to quality can therefore be explained by the type of evolution of their original public action programs: the erosion of the reinforced regulation program in Chile versus the continuity of an academic excellence project in Colombia.
The reconstruction of the trajectories of the two policies highlights the power relationships and institutional dynamics shaping the neo-managerial narrative in each of the two countries. Instead of associating quality assurance with a rigid and invariant neo-managerial regulatory regime, the article proposes an alternative reading that highlights the spatial and temporal variations of this regime.