Academic staff quality in higher education: evidence from program accreditation in Vietnam

Academic staff quality is a critical factor in higher education quality assurance and accreditation, often shaping program success. Yet, its performance across standards, institutions and disciplines warrants detailed examination against prior research. This study assesses the academic staff quality standard across 1605 accredited higher education programs in Vietnam, exploring its standing, distribution and variations by institutional type and discipline group. Employing the document analysis approach with secondary data extracted from accreditation reports and datasets, the study analyzes scores on a 1–7 scale to evaluate the performance of university faculty quality criteria. The research results show that the standard on academic staff quality ranks the second out of 11 standards with its criteria ranking 6th–23rd of 50 criteria. Academic staff working in public institutions outperform those at private ones in research, training and planning. For discipline groups, Education and Teacher Training excel, while Humanities lag in planning and research. Overall, in the evaluation of academic staff quality criteria, performance management emerges as a notable strength, while workload management is identified as a relative weakness. These findings provide evidence-based insights to guide policy and institutional strategies for enhancing academic staff quality in Vietnamese higher education.