The English Funding Council has announced its intention to invite tenders for the contract currently held by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), and the Australian government is promoting a Bill to curb the activities of the equivalent body, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency. This article compares the two…

Higher education institutions are facing increasing pressures to review their curriculum (Uchiyama and Radin 2009). The expectations of stakeholder groups, including students, parents and families, governments, employers and society in general have become increasingly explicit and targeted (Bamber et al. 2009). Universities are expected to play a…

Not for the first time in its history, the UK Higher Education sector finds itself in a position of significant financial constraint. The current coalition Government's actions to address the budget deficit have led to sweeping cuts across many public sector departments, but it is higher education that has seen the most draconian reduction in…

The nature of higher education in further education colleges is poorly understood, even though it is central to government policies on expansion, diversity and widening participation in English higher education. One reason has to do with scale. Another has to do with complexity. A final reason has to do with their status as further education…

As the author's contribution to a series marking the Golden Jubilee of the Association of University Administrators, he reflects on changes in quality assurance over the past twenty years and speculates on what the future may hold for quality as the association moves into a new and very different competitive regime. He begins by discussing the…

Getting the branding right for one's university will make a difference to student recruitment, and probably to wider perception in the community. Everyone in higher education knows, and most people outside it know, that reputation is "everything" to universities. In this article, the author draws a distinction between "branding"--which is what…

It might not have been quite what he had in mind when he said it, but Aristotle was right: good quality assurance must be a habit embedded at every level within higher education, not an isolated occurrence. But even good habits can become mere routine, in danger of being emptied of their original purpose and meaning. Periodically, review and…

This article presents the first part of Professor David Eastwood's paper given as the AUA Annual Guest Lecture on October 24, 2007. He begins the article with some reflections on the distinctiveness and the self-referential self-confidence of higher education (HE) because he wants to torsion his later remarks against what he takes to be its…

Managing universities "is" different from managing in most other sorts of organisation. In this article, the author shows why this claim is more than just special pleading, and how it relates to the particular form of the organisation. Appreciating their integrative aspects helps people to understand some of the difficulties that they regularly…

This paper reports on a study visit organised under the auspices of the AUA's UK/Canada Exchange Scheme, which provided an opportunity to visit the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary and the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver) over a four-week period. As Canada and the UK demonstrate…

This is a summary of a paper prepared for a conference on the White Paper of 2003, sponsored by The Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkeley, and OxCHEPS, New College, Oxford, in Oxford, 28-30 September 2004. It offers reflection on the history of the relationship between British higher education and various British governments since…

Higher education (HE) in the UK is undergoing extensive changes. One key change is the increasing prominence of postgraduate education. Higher demands on employees create the desire for more qualifications and greater skills. This increasingly consumer-oriented focus to postgraduate education has created a need for information about quality and…