The Rise of Quality Assurance in Asian Higher Education

Mahsood Shah, Quyen T.N. Do

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780081005590
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

The Rise of Quality Assurance in Asian Higher Education provides information on the well researched quality assurance frameworks, processes, standards, and internal and external monitoring that have taken place around the globe. However, in Asia, where higher education has witnessed rapid growth, and is also contributing significantly to international education which is benefited by many developed countries, this data has not been readily available.

In recent years, governments in Asia have made significant investment with an aim of creating education hubs to ensure that higher education is internationally competitive. This book examines the developments in higher education quality assurance in eleven Asian countries, providing systematic insights into national quality assurance arrangements and also examining the different approaches governments in Asia have implemented based on social and economic contexts.

• Includes chapters from eleven countries that examine quality assurance arrangements
• Explores untold case studies of countries, such as Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, Korea, India, and others
• Examines higher education context, quality assurance arrangements, effectiveness, challenges, and international quality assurance in Asia
• Offers contributions from leading scholars and practitioners who are working in higher education in Asia
• Provides engagement for research students

Chapter 1

Stakeholder Views of Quality Assurance in Cambodian Higher Education

Moniroith Vann¹ and Christopher Ziguras², ¹Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, ²RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Abstract

Since the 2000s, Cambodia has seen a dramatic increase in the number and size of higher education institutions, reaching towards the stage of massification after almost three decades of political unrest. Some view this increase in the scale of higher education as a great achievement for Cambodia, having significantly widened access for students who wish to pursue their studies in higher education. However, critics describe some higher education institutions in Cambodia as little more than diploma mills, providing low-quality education that does not meet the national needs for the development of skills. This chapter outlines the strategy the Cambodian government has developed to ensure the quality of its higher education, and how the different stakeholder groups in Cambodia view the effectiveness of the government’s strategy to ensure the quality of higher education.

Keywords

Cambodia; policy-borrowing; Accreditation Committee of Cambodia; massification; stakeholder perceptions

1.1 Introduction

When the government of Cambodia introduced the idea of privatization of higher education in the late 1990s, the country’s higher education institutions were still struggling to rebuild following the calamitous destruction during the Khmer Rouge regime (Sloper, 1999). Since that time, both the number of higher education institutions (HEIs) and the enrollment rate have risen dramatically. As in many other countries in Southeast Asia, a period of rapid growth was followed by a focus on the quality of the system (Ford, 2003). Since 2000, the Cambodian government and international organizations have regularly expressed concerns over the quality of educational services offered by higher education providers. The Cambodian government has taken various steps intended to improve the quality of higher education, including the establishment of the Education Law in 2007, the Accreditation Committee of Cambodia (ACC) in 2003, the National Supreme Council for Education in 2009, and the National Framework for PhD Assessment in 2010. All of these measures were part of a comprehensive quality assurance framework that aimed to improve the quality of Cambodian higher education after a period of rapid and virtually unregulated growth in the number of higher education institutions. This chapter examines the development of the current quality assurance system and the perceived effectiveness of the government’s strategies in the eyes of key stakeholder groups.

1.2 The Development of Quality Assurance in Cambodia

During their reign of terror between 1975 and 1979 the Khmer Rouge completely destroyed the few HEIs that had existed in Cambodia and murdered or forced into exile virtually the entire formally educated population of the country. The task of reconstruction was massive and the legacy of this era still haunts Cambodia. Eight public universities were established between 1979 and 1997 but with quite small enrollments due to constrained public finances, the lack of qualified teaching staff, and scant physical resources. In 1997 the government began to allow the establishment of private higher education institutions, and since that time enrollments have continued to grow very rapidly, with the gross enrollment ratio in tertiary education increasing from just 2.4 in 2001 to 15.9 in 2011 (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2016).

There are now 105 higher education institutions, with a combined enrollment of 253,764 students, 39 of which are public institutions and 66 private. Governance arrangements are complex, with these institutions overseen by 14 different ministries. The Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport (MoEYS) directly manages nine public and 56 private institutions while the other 40 institutions are primarily managed by 13 other ministries, with the MoEYS Directorate General for Higher Education playing a coordinating role (Kingdom of Cambodia, 2015).

The Cambodian government has established rules, regulations, and laws for the purpose of improving the quality of its higher education. The 2007 Education Law had the main aim of developing and strengthening human resources for Cambodia through life-long learning and education for all. The Education Law was also intended for the quality improvement in educational services offered by educational institutions in Cambodia. Article 22 of the Education Law requires that both public and private education providers develop an internal mechanism in order to monitor and assess the quality of education. MoEYS in implementing this law has issued a directive requiring all HEIs to set up their own Internal Quality Assurance Unit (IQAU).

The Supreme National Council for Education was established in 2009 with the main objective of developing educational policies and long-term strategies for assessing all education-related activities in response to social and economic development of Cambodia. The Supreme National Council for Education is made up of top government officials including the Prime Minister and senior dignitaries. The National Framework for Ph.D. Assessment was set up by a Sub-Decree in 2010, defining the requirements for Ph.D. programs as well as developing a mechanism for effective control of the PhD-training related activities in Cambodia.

The principal quality assurance agency in higher education is the ACC, which was founded in 2003. The World Bank had provided considerable support to establish the ACC, which it intended to be independent from the Cambodian government and consisting of various representatives from ASEAN, the government, commerce and industry, together with the rectors, teachers, and students (Innes-Browns, 2006). The World Bank has been the most active international donor agency helping Cambodia to develop and reform its higher education sector since the 1990s. However, the Cambodian government placed the ACC under the management of the Council of the Ministers, which created a lot of controversy over the ACC’s independence and led to the World Bank withdrawing from the project. For much of the next decade, the ACC was headed by influential political figures, before oversight of the ACC was transferred to the MoEYS in 2013. Since that time the ACC’s management structure has not yet been reframed, and its functions appear to have slowed down due to the fact that the MoEYS has not yet fully accommodated the ACC. Based on the policies and regulatory agencies the Cambodian government has put in place in order to ensure the quality of its higher education, it is obvious that the Cambodian government really has a keen interest in the quality improvement of higher education. The ACC was intended to be an independent body whose duties are to determine the accreditation policy and measures to assure academic quality, and to determine the accreditation status for all HEIs in Cambodia. Furthermore, the ACC is supposed to maintain records of institutional and program evaluation and quality assurance activities in each HEI and ensure proper participation of stakeholders concerned with the outcomes of each academic institution that applies for accreditations (Sen, Ros, & Hieng, 2013).

1.3 Importing Quality Assurance

The development of higher education quality assurance systems in developing nations over the past decade has often been considered in terms of the relationship between the national government and international actors, usually donor agencies. As with many other forms of contemporary policy transfer, the dominant view is neo-institutionalist belief that as the world’s educational systems converge, policies that have proven effective in one place will be replicated in others, and the diffusion of effective policies is aided by international organizations whose experts provide advice to national governments regarding appropriate models. However, in the case of Cambodia the imported policies that have been introduced based on foreign advice appear to have had little impact.

Before we go on to consider the views of stakeholder groups in Cambodia concerning the adequacy of the quality assurance system, we need to consider this policy transfer in light of the well-established critiques of top-down policy advice by donor agencies in developing countries. Initiatives to form quality assurance mechanisms for higher education in low-income developing countries such as Cambodia are normally heavily influenced by the aid donor agencies through a dominant-dependent donor relationship. Many developing nations depend mainly on the various external aid agencies for assistance ranging from overall education policy and planning to major reform efforts at various level and various components of the system (see for example, Asanova, 2006; Samoff, 1999; Spaulding, 1981).

Aid donor agencies have in the past advocated the wholesale transfer of governance and quality assurance systems and practices from the West to such countries (Rodwell, 1998). Subcontractors and foreign experts who diagnose the issues or problems of higher education in the recipient country often perceive aid from donor agencies to a developing nation as a lucrative business opportunity. In many cases, foreign experts spend a short period of time consulting some relevant local senior officials, reviewing available data, making visits to a few selected HEIs and basing complex transformations of governance arrangements on their first impressions of the higher education system in the recipient nation. Dore (1994), for example, has argued that the recommendations from the foreign experts are often constrained by insufficient empirical support. As a result, their reports usually come in the form of a series of superficial observations followed by a set of recommendations or policy statements that are not always relevant to the underlying economic, social, and political context of the recipient nation (McGinn, 1997; Samoff, 1999; Tilak, 2002).

While these deficiencies in the design of donor-funded policy proposals are well-documented, and clearly are a factor in the case of Cambodia, we set out here to understand the ways in which various stakeholder groups in Cambodia interpret the adequacy of the quality assurance framework. As Steiner-Khamsi (2012, 2014) has argued, in order to understand whether policies are ‘successfully’ transferred from one system to another we must understand the ways in which various aspects of a policy framework are actively used, resisted, modified and ignored by key actors in the ‘receiving’ or ‘borrowing’ country.

1.4 Stakeholders’ Views

This study recruited representatives of key stakeholder groups in Cambodian higher education through a process of snowball sampling, using the initial and subsequent participants to suggest others who would fall within the sample frame suggested by (Ryan, 1995). Eventually, 61 informal face-to-face interviews with open-ended questions were conducted. The stakeholder groups in this study included students, lecturers, university rectors, university consultants, senior officials in MoEYS, representatives of donor agencies such as the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank, and two academic professional associations. Most interviews were tape-recorded and later transcribed verbatim, and where recording was not possible extensive notes were taken. NVIVO software was used to aid coding and thematic analysis of transcripts and notes. The students that participated in the study were unfamiliar with government strategies for higher education and quality assurance systems; therefore their responses are not included in the discussion below.

The views expressed by participants were quite polarized, with the stakeholders falling into pro- and anti-government camps. The pro-government groups tended to support the existing higher education quality assurance initiatives, and they described the current situation from a historical frame of reference. That is, despite the existing flaws, the system, they believed, was improving and the government could not be blamed for any deficiencies, given the devastation caused by the Khmer Rouge period. The other groups tended to be critical of the government’s quality assurance initiatives, viewing them from an international-comparative frame of reference. They perceived that Cambodia was falling behind other countries in the region which were reforming more effectively. Though different stakeholder groups were more or less sympathetic to the government, they shared a set of widely held views that are discussed below.

1.5 Lack of Implementation of Donor-Funded Projects

All those participants who were familiar with the origins of the various proposals to reform higher education pointed to the tendency for policy prescriptions of aid donors to be adopted only at the most superficial levels. There was widespread agreement that the government’s policies regarding higher education quality assurance sounded excellent on paper but that the implementation was not effective. There is a long history in Cambodia of government leaders agreeing with donors to adopt a particular policy approach and then to claim the policy statements developed by foreigners to be their policies without realizing the ramifications (McNamara, 1999).

One key consideration in understanding the reception of new policies by the government agencies is the shortage of well-qualified people to implement the policy on higher education successfully. Due to the fact that the MoEYS lacks well-qualified and experienced administrative staff to draft policy statements on higher education, many policies have been developed by foreign experts, in most cases employed by donor agencies such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, which borrow concepts and models from other countries with little customization to suit the Cambodian context. Sen et al. (2013) neatly capture the lingering effects of the Khmer Rouge period in the 1970s:

Cambodia is different in having to face these challenges without the assistance of a previous generation of university graduates, who should by now have become competent and experienced planners and managers, but who were dispersed and in many cases annihilated by a ge...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• List of Contributors
• Biographies
• The Growing Prominence of Quality Assurance in Asia
• Chapter 1. Stakeholder Views of Quality Assurance in Cambodian Higher Education
• Chapter 2. Quality Assurance in Chinese Higher Education
• Chapter 3. Quality Assurance in Hong Kong: Fit for Cultural Perception
• Chapter 4. Quality Assurance in Higher Education—An Indian Experience
• Chapter 5. The Rise of Quality Assurance in Indonesian Higher Education
• Chapter 6. Quality Assurance in Higher Education of Kazakhstan: A Review of the System and Issues
• Chapter 7. Quality Assurance System in Korean Higher Education: Development and Challenges
• Chapter 8. Quality Assurance and Quality Enhancement in Malaysian Higher Education
• Chapter 9. Quality Assurance Mechanisms in Mongolian Higher Education
• Chapter 10. The Rise of Quality Assurance in Thailand
• Chapter 11. Transforming Higher Education in Uzbekistan: From Quality Control to Quality Assurance Culture
• Chapter 12. Quality Assurance in the Vietnamese Higher Education: A Top-Down Approach and Compliance-Driven QA
• Index