ABSTRACT
"Accountability" has become a concept that catches the attention of the public and the politicians who have to fund the increasing cost of public higher education in many countries. Although the notion of accountability per se is not a new one, the debates around its applicability to processes of higher education occurred relatively recently. Since the 1960s, the golden years during which higher education was a highly favored activity, the general public, governments at various levels, and other interested parties, including parents and industry, have expressed the desire to have a fuller accounting of what higher education institutions are doing, why they do what they do, how they spend their money, and where they are going. Several recent developments in higher education systems point to concerns over accountability:
The dramatic increase in the number of students participating in higher education during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s led to a significant increase in higher education's share of public finance. By nature labor-intensive, tertiary education's relative costs per unit were rising very fast. Due to its size and economic impact, economists started to treat education as an industry.
In a climate characterized by economic recession and governmental, fiscal restraint since the middle of the 1970s, a marked curtailment of public higher education expenditure could be observed in many, if not most, countries.
The economic crisis also led to increasing unemployment, which also affected graduates from higher education. This, in turn, has raised serious concerns about the economic appropriateness of academic qualifications; the relationships between the "output" of higher education, the aspirations of new student generations, and the needs and absorptive capacity of the employment system for highly qualified labor are now regarded as unsatisfactory in many countries.
Competing claims from other sectors for public resources (e.g., new public priorities such as employment schemes, improvement measures for the environment, science and technology efforts) have set limits to the possibility of further expansion for tertiary education. The tertiary education sector not only faces increasing noneducational competition for tax money, but also heavy intrasectoral competition within the national systems of higher education. The hegemony of the university has been challenged by the Fachhochschulen in the Federal Republic of Germany, the Polytechnics in the United Kingdom, the Colleges of Advanced Education in Australia, the community and regional colleges in the United States, and by other alternate postsecondary forms of education all over the world.
Finally, japanese advances in technology and competitiveness have raised public interest in the future of university research. Several Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member states, for example, have expressed increasing concern about the research function of the universities within their national research and development (R&D) efforts in order to close the "gap." 1 Everywhere new forms of cooperation and communication between industry and the universities are being discussed. 2
