Change is the only Constant – Quality Assurance in Higher Education as a Tool for Reflective University Management

Quality assurance (QA) in higher education plays an increasingly important role in many university systems worldwide regarding the competitiveness of universities and entire national or regional university systems. The origins of what we consider today as systematic QA (e.g. accreditation processes, external evaluation, audits, etc.) can be traced back to the emergence of the new public management paradigm in the 1980s and 1990s which gave speed to the spread of periodically applied QA mechanisms in many higher education systems worldwide. Under new public management governments withdrew from a detailed university management approach, and universities were granted more autonomy and self-responsibility. At the same time they were required to legitimate their achievements and to take more accountability. In the long run this was supposed to promote more competition among the universities and to produce better outcomes and “value for money” (Hénard & Mitterle, undated).