Occasionally, I write pieces noting how oddball Canadian higher education is in international context, usually in ways that are poorly understood.  I want to do that again today, specifically with the notion of external quality assurance, a topic so foreign to much of Canadian academia that it sounds entirely made up.  We recognize it for program accreditation in certain (mainly professional) fields, but the idea that institutions are held accountable this way is largely unknown to most Canadian universities.

In most of the world, though, institutions are held accountable by external agency.  Usually, that’s some kind of government agency (the Quality Assurance Agency in the UK, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency in Australia, the Swedish Higher Education Authority, etc.).  There are, broadly, two models at work.

In the first model, the focus is mostly on disciplines/department.  Institutions do their own internal assessment of the discipline/programs, and then an external group comes in to do its own assessment.  Usually it’s not an entirely new assessment; rather, it’s a check-up on the already-completed internal assessment. The extern group investigates whether the institution used all available evidence, and if there is evidence of problems or gaps in evidence, they might ask some more penetrating questions.  But the point is, there is some kind of national peer oversight mechanism which regularly checks up and (usually) publicly reports on individual departments at individual institutions.

Now in Canada, we sort of have this, in the form of periodic program reviews (these go by slightly different names everywhere, but for now let’s stick with “program reviews”).  But crucially, we tend to have a one-tier system rather than a two-tier system.  That is, instead of an internal review and an external review, what we have is a single mainly internal review with some institutional colleagues from other departments and some disciplinary colleagues from other institutions thrown in.  Oh, and publication of results tends to be substantially more limited than it is elsewhere (because God forbid anyone find out that someone, somewhere, isn’t perfect).

I’ve never seen a good history of these arrangements, but my impression is that they were adopted in the late 1970s, mainly as a way to forestall any government action that might lead to what is now more or less a global standard.  “Look, see,” the argument went, “we already have external input, no need to create any new oversight mechanisms”.  I think I would argue that what we ended up with was a much weaker oversight system as a result, one which allows poor-performing units a lot more space in which to hide, but I am not sure how much weaker.

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The second model can be used either instead of or in addition to the first approach, because the focus is on the institution rather than the department or program.  Mostly, the focus is on processes, asking how the institution foster quality across all its operations (this can often include non-academic as well as academic functions).  The method is similar to the first model – internal self-assessment followed by external examiners.  Again, the goal of the external examiners is not so much to do an independent assessment as to do quality control on the internal assessment, determining whether the institution covered all their bases when doing the assessment.  US institutional accreditation works along these lines, but so too does the UK QAA process and some other European systems as well.  No Canadian province really requires this of institutions (the Ontario Universities Council on Quality Assurance is a step in this direction, albeit a relatively toothless one set up by universities themselves rather than government), though occasionally one sees institutions submitting themselves to this kind of review independently; Simon Fraser University’s foray into the NCAA required them to undergo such a process with a US accrediting agency, for instance.

Now I say “established universities” because in fact in several provinces, “new” degree-granting institutions in Canada – including public colleges who want to offer degrees – actually do in fact have to undergo both of these kinds of external evaluations, at least in Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan.  Starting in about 2000, all of these provinces began experimenting with new forms of degree delivery, and in order to reassure the public about these innovations, they arrived at solutions that look a heck of a lot like those in force in most of Europe and Asia.  But in all of these provinces, the rights of existing universities to carry on with minimal external oversight was simply assumed.  In Canada, there has never been an attempt to try to impose external quality assurance regimes – which are 100% the norm in virtually every other country in the world – to the established universities.

How should one interpret this anomaly?  One obvious way would be to say that provincial governments are in the main clueless about quality assessment and so have never pushed the idea of external quality assurance very hard with institutions, who in any case would very much prefer this idea die in a fire.  And there would be some truth to this.  When doing consultations on this issue for the Government of Saskatchewan a few years ago, I remember meeting some very shocked faculty members who could not conceive of external quality assurance as anything but a violation of academic freedom (general awareness that external quality assurance was normal in the rest of the academic world was pretty close to zero).

There is a more charitable interpretation, however, which also has a great deal of truth.  And that is simply that external quality assurance regimes are a necessary solution only where there is a lack of trust in the quality of the output.  And, whatever the failings of Canadian universities may be, they still have an awful lot of public trust.  When our firm was doing interviews with parents across the country last year on the subject of how to choose a school for their children, one of the most common refrains we heard was “Canadian universities are all pretty good”.  And it’s not as though the lack of external quality assurance has had a big impact on our national educational brand.  Our best universities show no sign of being hindered by it in their global rankings, and it certainly doesn’t seem to do a lot of harm to our ability to recruit students from abroad, either.

So yes, Canada is a big outlier internationally in our lack of external quality assurance.  But, one could make a reasonably strong case that this is because we are also a big outlier in terms of public trust in universities.  And that’s not a bad place to be.