Quality in higher education institutions: insights from the literature

1. Introduction

Dynamic market forces are compelling higher education institutions (HEIs) to adapt to remain relevant and competitive. Like many service settings, HEIs are incorporating quality concepts, which originated in manufacturing settings (Hides et al., 2004), to enhance the quality of learning (Sohail et al., 2003), achieve stakeholder satisfaction (Sahney et al., 2008) and improve processes and competitiveness (Tasopoulou and Tsiotras, 2017). Quality in HEIs is contextual and is operationalised through multi-dimensional, multi-level and dynamic approaches (Vlăsceanu et al., 2004). In the context of HEIs, quality refers to fitness for purpose, value for money, perfection, transformation and distinctiveness (Harvey, 2007) and is categorised in terms of educational quality and administrative quality (Lola, 2013). Educational quality pertains to teaching processes and stakeholder perceptions (Mok, 2002; Rosa et al., 2003). Administrative quality concerns infrastructure and administrative processes. To fulfil their social role, HEIs must provide an excellent, valuable and affordable education (Mazzarol et al., 2003). Moreover, satisfying stakeholders such as students, staff and societal actors enhances loyalty and retention (Marginson and Rhoades, 2002; Morley, 2003). Consequently, defining, measuring and assuring quality are important concerns among HEIs (Harvey and Williams, 2010). Recent literature reviews have explored themes such as effective leadership (Bryman, 2007), quality assurance (Nicholson, 2011), teaching quality (Endrizzi, 2014), peer review of teaching (Thomas et al., 2014), student engagement (Mandernach, 2015) and teaching quality (Greatbatch and Holland, 2016). This paper aims to explore the literature on quality in HEIs. The research questions are: RQ1.

What methodologies have been used to explore quality in HEIs?

RQ2.

What is the status of articles across various journals?

RQ3.

How literature of quality in HEIs is growing?

RQ4.

How quality is operationalised in HEIs?

The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. Section 2 details the methodology, which is followed by the presentation of the data analysis and results in Section 3. The discussion in Section 4 concludes with limitations and avenues for future research.

2. Methodology

This paper employed a systematic review method to analyse, summarise and draw inferences (Tranfield et al., 2003) from the available literature on quality in HEIs. The unit of analysis was peer-reviewed journal papers published in English. The timeframe for this literature review was 1999–2017....