In 2021, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) implemented its recognition standard on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), identifying their combined importance in assuring quality in higher education, and recognizing their essentiality in realizing the vision of higher education as a public good. Recent Supreme Court decisions…

The pandemic has been (and continues to be) a challenge to public services globally. It revealed that public services that are managed under a neoliberal agenda and thus are evaluated against their cost-effectiveness, are threatened to fail delivering appropriate services to those in most desperate need. This can also be transferred from health…

Beyond the opportunity of crisis, the climate is favorable for major change in quality review. This report presents five specific steps that can lead to reinventing review of quality in higher education, a post-COVID redesign of accreditation and quality assurance that, if effective, will establish a foundation for the next era of these important…

Artificial intelligence (AI) holds significant implications for higher education; however, references to AI in the literature are often vague and open to debate. In order to understand how to progress AI-related research and analysis, this critical review systematically searched top higher education journals for references to the term 'artificial…

This Semiannual Report presents the activities and accomplishments of the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Inspector General (OIG) from October 1, 2022, through March 31, 2023. The report highlights audits, investigations, and related work issued during this time frame. Sections include: (1) Pandemic Relief Oversight; (2) Disaster Recovery…

Paul Kei Matsuda has written about the divide between US composition and applied linguistics, which he attributes to an institutionalization of the division of labour between applied linguistics and composition in the early 1960s. Therefore, when language concerns resurfaced in composition in the early 2000s, this division of labour led to a…

Purpose: Providing higher education institutions (HEIs) with a tool for self-assessing their social responsibility (SR) that generates the information and knowledge necessary to a strategic approach to adopting the Green Paper recommendations about the SR of HEIs. Setting out the collaborative policy development process to construct the tool…

The impact of neoliberalism in higher education has been widely discussed and debated, yet most analyses have viewed the changes on university governance and academic work in different countries as slavishly bound by more global neoliberal factors without paying sufficient attention to the local contextual factors. This empirical study foregrounds…

This paper considers the widening access and participation agenda, its implications for higher education institutions (HEIs) and contends that it must be underpinned by strategic measurement and monitoring. Access is viewed through the following lenses: (i) supporting participation, and (ii) facilitating equity. Using mixed methods, the paper…

(IOs) are influential policy actors in higher education. Yet, little is known regarding the role of philanthropic foundations in sponsoring IOs for policy promotion. By relying on longitudinal analysis of grants, semi-structured interviews, and social network analysis, this study examined the most central IOs within foundation-sponsored networks,…

Constructive Alignment (CA) is neither the panacea, nor the unalloyed evil depicted in the majority of higher education discourses. But rather, the theory is a heuristic and accessible representation of commonly agreed upon aspects of modern curriculum and educational theory, designed explicitly to support learning and teaching. However, when…

This report provides research and practical advice on how boards of trustees can influence diversity, equity, and inclusion practices and policies. The report argues that boards must be strategically woven into the conversation in order to guide intentional changes to policies, practices, procedures, behaviors, and attitudes towards racial equity.

Evidence shows that what students study matters as much as, if not more than, where they study. Program-level measures can provide important data on student outcomes, which will allow policymakers to hold institutions and programs that receive federal funding accountable. This fact sheet highlights some of the most frequently discussed measures…

The Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) is a national, nongovernmental membership organization of degree-granting colleges and universities, the only organization with the sole purpose of providing national coordination of accreditation of higher education institutions and programs. CHEA serves as an advocate, national authority and…

The need to improve institutional performance seems clear considering equity gaps and the high costs associated with higher education. Although the idea of holding higher education institutions accountable for their students' success is laudable, it is also pushing many institutions to make decisions based on meeting externally imposed metrics.…