From Evaluation to Accreditation: Dilemmas of institutional quality assurance in Denmark

Quality was introduced as political priority in Danish higher education during the 1980ties, associated with new public management as well as with new liberalism and conservatism. As a political goal the concept of quality has a paradoxical character because it does not lay out any definite course for policy. In the state controlled and public financed Danish higher education system quality assessment became institutionalised in a national agency, the "evaluation centre", which was to do recurrent assessment of all higher education programmes. This was later given up. Recently accreditation of education programmes has been introduced, also in the form of a national agency with the mission of accrediting all higher education programmes. The paper discusses reasons for and problems in this approach, and the more general social functions of quality assessment and accreditation.