Study On Quality Assurance Agency System In The European Higher Education Area

Since 1980s, higher education has a rapid development in the whole world. Under the situation of higher education globalization, the higher education sector and the quality of its evaluation and assessment in one country not only are essential to the country's social and economical development, but also are the key factors of the influence of its higher education in the world. So establishing quality assurance system of higher education is fundamental either to supervise the quality of domestic higher education or to participate into the international activities in the field of higher education. Education assurance is the practice with high professional skills and technical methods. Its scientific implement needs special agencies to make sure. So in the last two decades lots of quality assurance and accreditation agencies have appeared.In Europe, with the integration of politics and economy, in the field of higher education, in the year of 1999, European ministers of education signed Bologna Declaration calling for European countries to establish a united European Higher Education Area (EHEA) in 2010. By realizing the great ambition step by step, the European countries want to compete with the U.S.A. in the field of higher education. They want to attract more intelligent people to come to Europe and steer higher education scientific research in the world. So, the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA) was set up in 1999. It is the umbrella organisation for European external quality assurance agencies in the field of higher education and it was created to promote European-wide cooperation between the different actors involved in the field of quality assurance in higher education. Until January 2007, ENQA has 46 member agencies.This paper tries to explore the two-level agency system of European Quality Assurance which set up by ENQA and its member agencies to find the answer to how to establish Chinese agency system. The paper studies the activities of ENQA and its member agencies and does some research on their relationship and explores that how ENQA and its member agencies co-establish the agency system by analyzing Portuguese example. According to the study, the paper wants to find the scientific way to establish the central-local two level system of quality assurance agency in China, which recovers all kinds and all levels higher education institutes all over the country.The paper consists of five chapters. In Chapter One: there is the reason why the paper chose this issue. And the paper analyzes some key terms in the paper.In Chapter Two: the paper emphasizes the Bologna Process—the establishment of EHEA and the development of the quality assurance issue.In Chapter Three: the paper explores the two-level agency system in EHEA, which consists of both international and domestic quality assurance agencies.In Chapter Four: the paper studies on the Portuguese example to find out that how ENQA gave guide to its member agency to establish the system.In Chapter Five: the paper tries to find a way to establish scientific system of quality assurance agencies in China, according to the conclusion from what the paper has researched in the chapters above.