Drawing upon earlier studies of reforms and institutional changes in higher education, the purpose of this paper is to trace how the understanding of accountability has changed over the past twenty years and how it is understood to have impacted on higher education institutions. We do so by reviewing more than 350 papers and by asking three questions: Who answers to whom? For what are they answering? And how to assess those accountability arrangements? With these three questions as guides, our results indicate that higher education institutions have been undergoing processes of what we term accountabilization. These results contribute to the scholarship on higher education governance by conceptualizing the processes of accountabilization.