Quality assurance mechanisms in Pakistan - A case of national business education accreditation council

• In Event: Professionalization and accreditation for quality education: issues in South Asia

Proposal

Analyzing the Quality Assurance (QA) policies and mechanisms in the higher education sector of Pakistan this paper discusses the match/mismatch between global best practices and local contexts. Lao (2015) suggests that the global attention on QA has resulted in systematic development of policies, setting processes in place and appointing independent QA agencies in Higher Education, which is parallel to Pakistan’s obsession with quality assurance measures in the late 90’s and early 2000s, since the inception of Higher Education Commission (an autonomous body overseeing higher eduction sector).

It highlights how policy borrowing initiatives result in systems that are similar in structure and form yet different in their purposes and functionality. Using the National Business Education Accreditation Council (NBEAC) in Pakistan as a case study, the paper maps the work of NBEAC on Philip and Ochs’s (2013) four-stage policy borrowing model. Based on the western accreditation models i.e. EQUIS (EFMD Quality Improvement System), AACSB (The Association of MBAs) and AMBA (The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) – though not mentioned explicitly – I argue that the established QA initiatives by NBEAC might fall short of their intended outcomes due to “selective policy borrowing” (Khamsi, 2016).

Grounded in the literature of policy borrowing (Portnoi, 2016), and quality assurance mechanisms the paper uses document analysis (Bowen, 2009) as a method, to explore if QA measures in business education accreditation are in full compliance with the broader policies/frameworks of the higher education sector in Pakistan.
Preliminary findings suggest that the program can experience unforeseen circumstances during the implementation (the 3rd stage) and indigenization (the 4th stage) of Philip and Ochs’s (2013) model.

The study not only fills the void in literature around QA measures and policies in Pakistan but also addresses the unintended outcomes of policy borrowing such as the recent mushroom growth in substandard business schools across the country.

Author

• Shahrman Khattak, OISE, University of Toronto