Questions of Quality: in Europe and Beyond. Higher Education Report No. 1.

These two papers look at international aspects of quality in higher education from contrasting perspectives. The first paper, "Higher Education Quality: A European Dimension" by John Brennan asks whether there is a distinctive European dimension to quality in higher education and, if so, what are its implications for British institutions and their students. The first part of this paper reviews current higher education policy developments in the European Community and considers the issues which they raise for quality. The second part of Brennan's paper reports on the results of a number of recent projects which have attempted to assess the quality of educational programs across several countries and considers implications of these studies for British institutions. The second paper is "Towards a General Model of Quality Assessment in Higher Education" by Frans A. van Vught. It proposes a general model of quality assessment consisting of a number of elements. It puts these elements in an historical context of quality assessment in medieval universities and makes a distinction between the intrinsic and extrinsic values of higher education and types of assessment related to each. It also deduces the elements from recent experiences with quality assessment in the United States, Canada, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. (JB)