What Has Happened to Quality?

The national Danish parliament recently agreed a new model for university funding, placing more emphasis on performance incentives, outcome, and quality. The general political statement about the new model was that it would develop and intensify the framework for quality measurement and that the new reform would pave the way for rewarding quality in higher education.
The intensified focus on quality and quality measurement is by no means only a Danish phenomenon. On the contrary, over the last 20 years, universities around the globe are drowning under a tsunami of quality assurance systems. Supposedly, these quality assurance systems set a more or less common
framework for quality assurance, they enable improvement of quality, they support mutual trust within and across universities and borders, and they provide valuable information on quality for the media and stakeholders. But the quality assurance systems have also become a very contested territory—and rightly so. Accompanied by other (neoliberal) regulatory tools, the quality assurance systems have changed academia, and some would even argue that they have threatened the raison d’être of academia by turning universities into manufacturing companies with counterproductive quality standards.
After a description of some of the most common quality assurance regulatory principles, we will (1) analyze the concept of quality in present-day higher edu- cation, (2) analyze some of the consequences that quality assurance systems impose on universities, and (3) discuss how the quality assurance agenda affects students.