External Quality Assurance In Higher Education In The Netherlands

The Netherlands is one of the first ones to develop formal external quality assurance system in higher education.The foundation of the system was related to the social enviorenment directly which changed the higher education'social status and beared more social control to higher education.The Netherlands develop into "pile-up model" in which the universities and institutions for higher professional education are separately audited by Association of Universitie in the Netherlands and Council of Higher Professional Education, and the government influences the system through the Inspectorate for Higher Education'reevaluation on these two organization.In 2000s,the Minister of Educaion,Culture and Science introduced an accreditation system, incorporating and largely replacing the existing quality assurance mechanisms.The Netherlands Model is one of the well-known quality assurance models of higher education,it is composed of four factors:national organization, self-evaluation,peer-evaluation,final report.It has characters as follow:the government is responsible for macrodirection;the intermediary bodies implement the pratical evaluation and accreditation;the meta-evaluation and the evaluation of the follow-ups are stressed;the evaluation is carried in national and international perspective;the colleges' autonomy is respected;the external quality assurance promotes the internal quality assurance.With the reform of socialistic market economy and the higher education management,the current external quality assurance in China needs some modifications. We can use the Holland model for reference.First, the government should reorient its role in the external quality assurance system and evaluate the higher schools' follow-ups.The colleges should erect evaluation atmosphere to attend external quality assurance system actively.The intermediary evaluation bodies should enhance its independence and authority.The evaluation standards should be different for different types of colleges,and reflect the attitute of the society and the academia.The formative evaluation should be adopted.During the evaluation,the interests of colleges should be respected.