Service Quality In Higher Education

RECENT ASSESSMENT TOOLS OF QUALITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, service quality assessment is an issue that cannot be neglected by any university, even in the higher education in developing countries. In order to tackle this problem, it is necessary to invest in quality systems and tools for improvement. Universities are usually driven to engage in reforms by a variety of forces, which mostly come from globalization, supply and demand issues, competition, accountability, and technology. Their survival and development are determined by improving service quality that satisfy students’ needs, since it is vital to higher education services. Earlier researchers studied on higher education quality services emphasized academic

In contemporary knowledge intensive economies and societies, individual and societal progress is increasingly driven by technological advances. Prosperity requires nations to retain their competitive edge by developing and sustaining a skilled workforce, maintaining a globally competitive research base, and improving the dissemination of knowledge for the benefit of society at large. In this context, higher education represents a critical factor in innovation and human capital development and plays a central role in the success and sustainability of the knowledge economy (Dill and Van Vught, 2010). Hence, higher education has become increasingly important on national agendas and has undergone profound mutations and reforms worldwide over the past decades, as portrayed in a recent OECD review of tertiary education policies (OECD, 2008). As stated by Altbach et al., (2009) “an academic revolution has taken place in higher education in the past half century marked by transformations unprecedented in scope and

Quality assurance in Higher Education is also gaining importance very fast, for instance if we consider the Sorbonne Joint Declaration (1998) there was no any plan or decision about it, in addition quality assurance was not a major part of the Bologna Process during the start of the process on June 1999 and during the Prague Conference in 2001 there was no action plan, decision or collaboration between the member states of European Higher Education Area but this picture has changed during the Berlin Conference in 2003 and quality assurance in European Higher Education Area appeared on the agenda as a very important issue . It would not be wrong to say that quality assurance is now one of the most important elements of Bologna Process which aims to set up European Higher Education