Quality assurance (QA) in higher education refers to a broad spectrum of policies, procedures, systems, and practices designed to enhance the quality of education and ensure that a minimum quality level is met (Vlăsceanu et al., 2007). QA systems for higher education have been implemented all over the world for the last 50 years (Uvalić-Trumbić & Martin, 2021). Despite the promised theoretical benefits of QA mechanisms for colleges and universities, the practical efficacy and utility have been contested in the last decades, both within and outside the academy. Governments have developed a series of policy changes to address critiques, improve the quality of education, and rebuild trust in higher education systems. However, these policy changes have encountered considerable resistance in their formulation, and each time their efficacy has continued to be questioned. Reaching agreement on major QA reforms has become increasingly challenging, and the policy formulation process has tended to result in only minimal changes to the previous policy. In contrast to prior studies that have generally examined the outcomes of QA policies or were undertaken in the name of advocacy, the research reported here aimed to shed light on the policy change process itself through empirical evidence. Specifically, this qualitative study focused on selected policy change initiatives for QA implemented in the United States and Europe over the last 3 decades that have promoted competition–cooperation mechanisms among accreditors. The aim was to understand how policies were formed and which arguments and evidence were used. The method adopted for this qualitative, multicase research was thematic analysis. This study used publicly available documents to examine the policy change process through a novel theoretical framework based on Lindblom’s incrementalism theory for policy change. The content of the policies and their amendments were employed as a proxy for the policy change process. The framework mapped the declared issues and expected outcomes, the forces involved, and the terminology and the policy instruments used. The study offered implications for theory, research, and policy practice in the area of quality assurance policy formulation. The analysis highlighted how different underlying discourse and logic have structured the policy change process. The policy’s language analysis revealed the complexity of the policy issues at hand, emphasizing the existence of gaps in the reasoning flow and narrative, probably due to ideological disagreements about the root of the issues, and the ways in which issues were understood and described by various actors. Potential misalignment between governments’ and practitioners’ visions of accreditation may have contributed to policy dissatisfaction and the perceived ineffectiveness of the accreditation process, suggesting that meaningful stakeholder engagement is critical to improve policy change processes. Moreover, the content and nature of a policy change seem to have influenced the number and range of stakeholder participation, the language used in their comments (e.g., degree of adversarial language), and the degree of resistance from policymakers toward accommodating stakeholder demands for modifications. Finally, both policy changes identified the autonomy of higher education institutions as a core component. Both policymakers seemed to recognize the institutions’ need to self-regulate in the arguments made to justify the policy change. The results of this study suggested a broader theoretical definition of incremental change.
Cecilia Bibbo' (Wed,) studied this question.