U.s. Graduate Education External Quality Assurance Study

The quality problem is the higher education's eternal problem. Toassure and improve the quality of higher education is the core contentsin the process of the reform and development of higher education inevery country in the world. The United Nations Educational, Scientificand Cultural Organization (UNESCO) consider the higher educationquality, higher education internationalization and propriety as the threemain developing issues. Modern society is the highly flourishedknowledge-based economic, science and technology leading thedevelopment of the world's economic society. Because postgraduateeducation is the highest level professional education, it plays animportant role in the knowledge-based economic society. Who own thehigh quality postgraduate education means who occupy advantage in theworld competition.The United States is the nation whose higher education is the mostflourishing and most influential in the world. Moreover its postgraduateeducation possesses very good social reputation because of its highquality.Only draw lessons from the advanced experiences of other countries,can we make up our own shortage and avoid making mistakes. On thispurpose, this dissertation is divided into five chapters to introduce theexternal quality assurance of the postgraduate education of the U.S.A indetails by adopting history methodology, document analysismethodology and case analysis methodology and take the externalquality assurance of postgraduate education as a research object. Firstly,I describe the postgraduate education of the U.S.A and its qualityassurance history. The development of American postgraduate educationhas mostly experienced three periods. The period of 1820s to the Second World War was its creation and development period. The period of theSecond World War to 1970s was its booming development period. From1970s to now, it pay attention to the postgraduate's quality assessment.Secondly I discuss the basic framework of its quality assurance——whatrole do the federal government, state government and intermediaryorganizations play and what function do they have. Then I introduce theaccrediting system and the ranking of universities in details by takingthe AACSB and US NEWS & WORLD REPORT as two cases. At last,I point out the characteristics and its perspective of Americanpostgraduate quality assurance.