An Initial Study On The Quality Assurance System Of Higher Education In The United States

Since the mid 1980s, quality of higher education has been one of the hottest issues in many countries. There has been an upsurge of quality assurance in higher education, whether in the developed countries or in the developing countries. Many countries make great efforts to establish a sound and equitable quality assurance system of higher education. Compared with other countries', the quality assurance system of higher education in the United States is old, rather mature and perfect. There are many precious experiences we should learn from it. Internationally, the researches on this theme are many. Since the late 1980s, researches related to this theme have been appearing in our country. Those studies mainly illuminate accreditation in the quality assurance system of higher education in the United States, but less account for other aspects of quality assurance system. As a result, the paper mainly adopts the following approaches to the analysis of the quality assurance system of higher education in the United States: documents reading approach, comparative approach, analytic approach, and so on. The paper endeavors to fully analyze the development, general framework and procedures of the quality assurance system of higher education in the United States, summarize its characteristics, review the problems existing currently and the countermeasures to those problems, and discuss the inspirations we can draw from it.