Quality has been missing from the HE debate. Let’s find it.
Education quality is part of the plumbing of higher education: it’s important, buried, and embarrassing when it goes wrong.
There’s also a lot of it. Australia has loads of performative HE quality in the form of ceremonies, consultations, ritualistic indicators, endorsements and weak proxies. There are acute quality problems which rear up like the odour of dead fish dumped overnight on a doorstep. And then, Australia has chronic issues with how it defines, articulates, measures and enforces the quality of learning and teaching.
There are good reasons for renewing interest in academic quality - for its inherent value - but also to respond to evident and wide-scale student alienation from higher learning.
Summary
Academic quality might be hard to define, but we need to do that definitional work to know what it means, and for whom.
Quality is adaptable. We need to have constant renewal of what quality means if we are to have a sector fit for the future, particularly the future outlined in the Universities Accord.
The tertiary sector has lost control of the quality narrative. It needs to get on the front foot. A collaborative and positive approach to quality is what we need. Now.
What even is academic quality?
It has become a received truth that Australia's HE is ‘top quality’ and ‘world-class’. Anyone who challenges this belief is seen as an outlier. Yet, the quality of education is not guaranteed, and certainly not because of any success in global rankings. Indeed, as universities have risen in rankings, and we have driven that success by international recruitment, so we have swept under the carpet a proper debate about quality.
The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) is the national body charged with ‘assuring’ HE quality in Australia, superseding the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA)’. While ‘quality’ is sprinkled adjectivally around its glossary, it doesn’t actually pin down a definition of quality in this specific setting.
Let’s spring from the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) definition:
Quality in HE refers to how well providers support students to consistently achieve positive outcomes in learning, personal development and career advancement, while meeting the reasonable expectations of those students, employers, government and society in general.
By positive outcomes, we mean evidence which demonstrates learning and progression by the student that is both meaningful for them and meets reasonable expectations - for example, a graduate can access a profession previously unavailable to them.
By reasonable expectations, we mean provision enables an experience and outcome that plausibly benefits the student and wider society, both during and after their study - for example, graduates finish their course with a certain standard of knowledge and skills.
Quality is partly relative. It is defined by expectations, conceptions of reasonableness, and stakeholder needs. Quality follows the thing, the service, the qualification, the idea. But it cannot be completely relative: ‘high quality’ has reference points which are established and codified with global rules.
As the Australian Government promises to expand tertiary education further, we need to talk about quality. How are the expectations of students, employers, governments and society changing? How can universities prepare for these expectations to change further? If the sector forgets to talk about quality, to articulate it both internally and externally, we’ll lose what’s important about HE.
The ghosts of quality past
For decades, HE in Australia like everywhere relied on the ‘sniff test’. This universally uncodified test invariably involved a prestigious academic coming along to pass their judgement on whether a student’s academic experience passed muster. Australia only developed an internationally recognised domestic quality system in the 1990s. Institutions viewed quality through the lens of fitness for purpose - as defined by institutions and the perception of value for money.
As tertiary education sectors around the world expanded, templates emerged to frame these academic experiences, which were then regularised, routinised, and gamed. At the outset, this really was about ‘quality’ rather than ‘regulation’ (including registration, accountability and accreditation) as there were typically only government institutions in the system.
Eventually, as the ‘system’ turned into a ‘quasi-market’, governments lost confidence in the academic nature of the exercise and turned the work over to public servants. Those public servants in turn contracted consultants, who then subbed lawyers. These are all different professional tribes who speak different languages. Quality in Australian HE has wandered far from its origins, which is not necessarily good for students, staff in HE, or society at large.
A re-/turn to quality
As troublesome as academics may be to the ‘massive higher learning machines’ which global universities have become, they are inherently the basis of education quality. By definition, it is impossible to outsource ‘quality matters’ to silicone chips, to consultants, to lawyers or to governments. That would be ‘pseudo-quality’, or more ‘performative quality’. Even, and especially, in the world’s biggest and best HE systems, quality is the domain of academics.
Academic quality resides with academics, and relies on discussion, debate, articulation, specification, evidence, investigation, and documentation. That work is executed with professional staff, and with the third-space professionals who are essential to the functioning of universities. All in pursuit of academic practice, and guided by academic expertise.
If it is accepted that quality in HE involves academic work, then it follows that it is complex and messy and expensive. Authentic academic governance, however, can be made more efficient by targeting with information to shape the implementation of academic work in risk-based and proportionate ways. This may echo the language of contemporary national discourse, but it doesn’t have to. There are indeed ways of proving academic quality which are not pseudo, expensive, or unreliable.
What is to be done?
We need a narrative on academic quality which works for governments and policymakers, for students, for a broader public. And which is achievable within our universities. At the heart of that system must be academic practice, but in such large systems we are stuck in a rut with limited appetite to empower academics to deliver quality. We need bold moves from the sector to take control of the narrative. We already have good foundations from surveys, academic committees, and ad hoc activities. What lies at the frontiers?
First, restore trust in academic judgement. This is the real bedrock. It is impossible to lawyer HE to anything beyond a half-hair above minimum quality standards. This must involve renewed faith, yes, ‘trust’ and ‘belief’ in rigorous and real-world PhDs, which remain the gateway qualification for academic work.
Universities need to celebrate experienced academics and their practices in the context of their disciplines. We tell these stories about our research, but less about our education practice. Where we can link to relevance for students and employers and professions and industries, we de-risk a narrative that we’re only interested in our ivory towers.
Second, train and register tertiary teachers. It is no longer acceptable that university teachers are the only teachers in the country where training is deemed a nice-to-have. Early childhood and school teachers require 60-80 days or supervised professional placement, plus all the theory and policy study, before they can teach.
The PhD might involve an optional short course on tutoring, but maybe not. People can, and do, teach badly for 40 years without a teaching qualification. They can also teach badly with such a qualification. But signals matter. Qualifications are likely important to raising the floor, rather than the ceiling, but that is itself a good start.
Third, Australia must have platforms for making it unavoidable for academics to talk together. Academics are by nature competitive and evidence-hungry. The appetite to succeed should be unleashed in structured fora rather than channelled within departments or institutions. Academics self-sauce in such ways with research, and more platforms are required with teaching. And not just to ‘share good practice resources’, but to challenge and push the boundaries of practice. Such dialogue is the substrate of academic quality, particularly given ongoing diversification of institutions, experiences, and outcomes.
Fourth, inevitably, better information on outcomes and RoE (that is, return on education) is required. Lining up behind trailblazer economies in Asia, North America and Europe, the present government wants to expand the tertiary education system to include up to 80 per cent participation. Seriously, is any government actually going to fund up to 80 per cent of a particular segment of the population to engage in education without assurance of quality experiences and most importantly outcomes? Forget education – from a straight political angle that’s a lot of voters to annoy with costly and poorly targeted services, unwanted resources, and wasted time. It follows, as schools discovered, that public thirst for data on outcomes grows with sector visibility and significance.
Fifth, the country needs evidence on the social contribution of HE. This is surely about the community, not about the sector. Remember, HE is a service and experience being pulled more than ever before into the mainstream economy. Australia needs data on the sustainability of HE institutions and the sector as a whole. This means data on sustainability and social impact.
Twenty years ago, Australia developed data on student engagement within universities, and now the challenge is to explore universities’ engagement in society. An important addition to reporting arrangements has been disclosures on student and staff safety. But there is much more to be told in terms of ethics and integrity and social value. Almost all of these metrics have been conceptualised. Much of the data exists, but has yet to be collated, analysed, and reported. Having such reports will provide insight to guide further institution expansion, and link with global reporting initiatives.
Sixth, there is an immediate need to re-/introduce humanity into education, and counter the existential and alienating threats to academic quality flowing from trillion-dollar Big Software (with great marketing). Generative AI is a beautiful thing if it is used well, in smart ways according to well established academic conventions. But it is not a ‘happy thing’ if it alienates or disengages students from their academic work, either because it is used to circumvent the kind of thinking or action required for learning. Such alienation is unfulfilling in so many ways.
People – academic teachers and students and others – must thrive to make HE thrive. Shuffling powerpoints and documents around on learning management systems does not make education higher.
What would quality look like?
We started with the sniff test and wrap with a pub test. Oy oy oy. What would the average punter think quality HE looks like if they were asked in the street? There may be mountains of conceptual and methodological complexity under the water line, but what pokes above?
Celebrate what is peculiarly academic about learning and teaching in the HE sector
Recognise teachers for their valuable work
Make improving teaching practice essential and enjoyable
Demonstrate the value and impact of HE for each individual
Tell the story for the whole sector and its contribution in, and for, society
Find authenticity and human connection
What’s next?
Quality is not just driven by government policies or institutional practices. We also need students. Students are central to the quality of learning and teaching, but their meaningful engagement in quality can only exist when institutions of HE initiate the conditions for that engagement.
Universities need to seize the narrative on quality, and to demonstrate to governments that they:
Have a genuine interest in understanding, and delivering, quality;
Have heard criticism from students, employers and government;
Can be creative in finding ways to address the floor of academic quality (the ‘threshold’), and to raise the ceiling (for ‘high quality’);
Will be much more inclusive in academic practice to provide the foundations for growing tertiary education to more diverse cohorts;
Will engage students authentically as co-creators of quality; and
Will measure and report on quality in ways which meet the needs of individuals and society
About
The Higher Good is a space in which interesting and impactful ideas are shared for the benefit of the Australian tertiary sector. It is all about public good. The space it fills sits between immediate news, which is well-served, and considered research on the sector which takes a longer view and which is also rarely timely. It is critical commentary with purpose.
The Higher Good explores a single topic from a range of perspectives recognising that few issues have a single answer. It draws on a diverse group of contributors – people who take pleasure in the exploration and communication of ideas which are both important and urgent.
The Higher Good aims to provoke, but not to court controversy for its own sake. It seeks to prompt reflection and reaction, debate and dissent.
Contributors
This collaborative article was written by Ant Bagshaw, Angel Calderon, Hamish Coates, Gwilym Croucher and Nadine Zacharias
Get in touch if you’d like to contribute to the dialogue and/or contribute to a future piece: info@thehighergood.net