Research On The Higher Education Quality External Assurance System In South Africa

Since 1960s, some countries stepped into the mass higher education. The higher education expanding caused many quality problems, many countries have established higher education external quality assurance system to improve the higher education quality, and so is South Africa (SA). After the establishment of Mandela democratic government, it started the quality reform of higher education in order to eliminate the disadvantageous affection to higher education which the apartheid system provide, and supplied all the people for high quality education. With years' exploit and reform, SA has established a perfect higher education external quality assurance system to govern, supervise and evaluate the quality of higher education now. It provides a substantial foundation to the improvement of educational quality. This thesis contains four parts as follows:Part one: the establishing background and development of the external quality assurance system in SA. Since the 1980s, the development of the external quality assurance system in SA experienced three stages: exploit, establish and improve stages, which had its own deep historical and actual reasons. First of all, it was affected by the international quality reform; Secondly, the economic globalization impelled the furious compete of human resource; the higher education quality improvement became the common tendency of the international higher education development; Thirdly, education quality and equality played a vital role in SA. in a long period time, the apartheid system effected SA in every aspects including higher education, in order to reduce the education quality differences between all kinds of race people, it necessary to reform the higher education quality in SA; Finally, the 21 century is a economic society, it is also a life-long learning one, perfect external quality assurance system will be the best way of providing excellent education resources to all citizen.Part two: the implement and operation of the external quality assurance system in SA. It describes its basic framework content and evaluating standards, taking Rhode University as example to detail how the external quality assurance system works, it provide a clear thinking way to acquire the implement and operation of the external quality assurance system. Part three: the characteristics of the external quality assurance system in SA. First, it has substantial juristical foundation; second, it has a perfect assurance system; third, it has multi-assurance bodies; Forth, it pays attention to the international cooperation.Part four: reflections and lessons. According to the analysis of the external quality assurance system in SA, this thesis provides some useful suggestions to the reform of the external quality assurance system in Chins by drawing lessons from SA.