Review of International Cross-Border Quality Assurance Procedures: A Study of 86 Transnational Importers and Exporters of Higher Education

• In Event: Contemporary research dimensions in international higher education

Proposal

Questions concerning quality assurance procedures and regulation of international cross-border higher education (CBHE) have often been raised in the global context. Low-quality or rogue foreign education providers have created a high level of mistrust among the public (Stella, 2006) and created problems for legitimate CBHE providers. This drove numerous international organizations to issue recommendations to regulate and ensure the quality of CBHE (e.g., ENQA, 2010; CHEA, 2011), especially with respect to the role of higher education institutions (HEIs) as exporters and importers of higher education.
In this paper, we will review transnational CBHE quality assurance procedures as well as compare and contrast, how internationally, the behavior of national governments differs in terms of how they regulate activities of their own public HEIs, and how they regulate the activities of foreign HEIs within their borders. The undertaken research will be extending the work previously done by Lane, Kinser and Knox (2013) studying the case of United States as an amalgamation of 50 states, as independent regulatory systems. They had found that state regulations focused on issues pertaining to the approval process of expansion, mandating administrative requirements providing comparable programs and guarding against unnecessary competition. Within the US, states also had more extensive regulations for importing activities than exporting activities.
Our research will draw on principal-agent theory to analyze how governments regulate the importing and exporting of their higher education systems. Within the principal agent framework, nations will be seen as the principal which contracts with the university or agent in order to advance the interests of the public. In particular, the focus is on the regulations that define and control activities that are performed by the agent. By building upon this framework, we analyze the relationship between the countries as both importing and exporting HEIs, in order to understand the policy interests of national governments.
The relationship between governments and public HEIs has been of interest to scholars, administrators and policy-makers for a long time now (Berdahl, 1971; Glenny and Bowman, 1977; Lowry, 2001; Lane, 2007). However, there is no study that investigates where the line is drawn when a public HEI operates outside its home country’s borders. Is it regulated by its country’s quality assurance framework or by its importing country’s policies?
The central questions guiding this research are as follows:
1. What behaviors do countries in regional geo-political and economic organizations, such as the European Union or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, regulate in regard to the exporting and importing of public colleges and universities? How do these findings compare to those found in regions with lesser economic or political integration among member states?
2. Do countries that share cross-border providers regulate similar behaviors? Do countries operate under a similar contract with a common regulatory framework for both importing and exporting HEIs?
3. How does the principal-agent relationship with the regulating government differ between cross-border producers and indigenous HEIs?
The analysis will be based at the country level, as nations retain primary legal authority over all educational activities within their borders. Qualitative document analysis (Hodder, 1998) will be conducted on the exporting and importing regulation documents to determine what was being regulated by each country. The CBHE quality assurance procedures already collected by the Cross-Border Education Research Team (C-BERT) at State University of New York, Albany, are being coded at present for 86 countries. Using open coding, 17 codes or exporting regulations and 22 codes for importing regulations have already been identified by the C-BERT team. Each code represents a type of regulatory activity, and each country is coded as either having a specific regulatory event or not. These exporting and importing groups will then be grouped into the four following analytic dimensions illustrating the primary areas of behaviors being regulated by governments: (1) procedures which identifies the range of institutional activity covered under the policy; (2) comparability which specifies the measures for new site/campus that must be equivalent to the home institution; (3) competition which indicates a concern with the educational market and existing institutions in the host state; (4) attributes which are organizational or academic requirements.
Through an analysis of regulatory frameworks, we will be able to draw conclusions on the behaviors of countries in regards to exporting and importing higher education, and how the principal-agent framework differs between cross-border providers and indigenous HEIs.
The findings of this research will help inform scholars of CIE and policymakers interested in multinational cross-border educational activities.

References:
Berdahl, R.O. (1971) Statewide Coordination of Higher Education, Washington, DC: American Council on Education.
ENQA. (2010) Quality Assurance in Transnational Higher Education, Brussels, Belgium: ENQA Secretariat.
C-BERT. (2011) List of International Branch Campuses. http://www.globalhighered.org/branchcampuses.php.
CHEA. (2011) Exploring the Future of International For-profit Higher Education and Quality Assurance: Where Are We Now and Where Do We Go from Here? Washington, DC: CHEA.
Glenny, L.A. and Bowman, F.M. (1977) ‘State intervention in higher education’, Report prepared for the Sloan Commission on Government and Higher Education, Cambridge, MA: Sloan Commission on Government and Higher Education.
Hodder, I. (1998) Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Material, Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.
Lane, J.E. (2007) ‘Spider web of oversight: latent and manifest regulatory controls in higher education’, Journal of Higher Education 78(6): 1–30.
Lane, J.E. (2011) ‘Importing private higher education: international branch campuses’, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis 13(4): 367–381.
Lane, J.E. (2012) ‘Higher Education and Economic Competitiveness’, in J.E. Lane and D.B. Johnstone (eds.) Colleges and Universities as Economic Drivers: Measuring Higher Education’s Role in Economic Development, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 1–27.
Lane, J., Kinser, K. & Knox, D. (2013) Regulating Cross-border Higher Education: A case study of the United States. Higher Education Policy (26), pp 147-172
Lowry, R.C. (2001) ‘Governmental structure, trustee selection, and public university prices and spending’, American Journal of Political Science 45(4): 845–861.
Stella, A. (2006) ‘Quality assurance of cross-border higher education’, Quality in Higher Education 12(3): 257–276.

Authors

• Maria I Khan, State University of New York at Albany

• Jason E. Lane, University at Albany, State University of New York