Defining Access and Quality in International Education

Abstract

Access and quality are key dimensions of any public service—health, infrastructure, and, of course, education. The terms are particularly ubiquitous in the field of international education, where over the past two decades they have been used to categorize both the challenges facing the Education for All movement and the work to address them. This chapter analyzes how these terms have been defined and used in the international education literature, and in particular focuses on understanding the connection between them. The discourse often presents access to education and education quality as either independent or competing concerns and uses them to explain the Global Learning Crisis. The chapter reviews evidence on the association between access and quality, laying the foundation for this theme to continue throughout the book.