ABSTRACT
Quality in higher education is important and is taken as axiomatic. What is more difficult is the task of making any meaningful generalizations about trends and issues. Increasingly institutions are expected to make a contribution to economic, social and cultural progress. This issue has both a conceptual and a practical dimension. The traditional view is associated with distinctiveness, something special or 'high class'. The variant often uses excellence interchangeably with quality, which it sees either as high standards or zero defects. It is about excelling in input and output: if the best students are lectured by Nobel Prize winners, the results may well be excellent. The variation dilutes the notion of excellence, focusing rather on the definition of a 'quality product' as one that has passed a series of quality checks. These checks are based on attainable criteria that are designed to reject 'defective' items.
