Are quality assurance and rankings useful tools to measure ‘new’ policy issues in higher education? The practices in Europe and Asia

ABSTRACT In the last years, ‘new’ policy issues, such as sustainability, have emerged, and old ones, such as social inclusion, have resurfaced on the political and public agendas. Higher education institutions (HEIs) are increasingly expected to respond to these ‘new’ challenges. But how are HE systems and HEIs (namely in Europe and Asia) looking at these ‘new’ policy issues and assessing them? This article focuses on what issues are being looked at by two of the most well-known tools or mechanisms used to assess the quality of HE – quality assurance and rankings – and how are these tools dealing with these ‘new’ challenges. This article concludes that the role of the ‘new’ policy issues in the assessment of institutional performance and quality is still very limited. Developing indicators that may be used for accountability purposes or improvement purposes is a major challenge that lies ahead. Facilitating the exchange of ideas, experiences, and knowledge on how to measure performance on the ‘new’ policy issues and on how to use that information in any of the rationale settings seems to be a promising way forward to get the ‘new’ policy issues embedded in quality assurance tools.