ABSTRACT
Quality and quality assurance are much debated issues in higher education (HE). Quality is not a new consideration in HE, but currently global knowledge economies are posing new challenges to universities which cannot anymore rely on their exception status as educational and social institutions. Rather, they have to react to the emerging commercialisation of higher education, even in national systems which only have public universities and strong government steering policies, such as Finland. The introduction of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) on the one hand and the expansion of sites capable of producing new knowledge on the other pose challenges to individual higher education institutions (HEIs) which have to find their place in these global HE markets. One way to rationalise one’s market position is to ensure the level of educational provision and knowledge production by developing internal procedures and systems for quality assurance (QA).
