María José Lemaitre
Comisión Nacional de Acreditación
Chile
Higher education occupied for years a restricted – and relatively encapsulated – social position. This is not meant to imply that it was unimportant, but rather that its importance affected only a small, albeit crucial, part of society. As such, it catered to an elite, both of students and faculty; commanded a portion of public funds which enabled it to operate successfully in teaching and research; and could easily operate far from the scrutiny that strategic social functions normally endure.
This is no longer the case. Today we see higher education at the center of what we tend to call the society of knowledge, or the information age. It is an essential part of national development for almost all countries in the world, whether they are already developed, are on their way there or aspire to be.
As such, it is subject to close scrutiny, and its quality, effectiveness and efficiency are no longer taken for granted, but must be demonstrated and verified.
Together with moving to center stage in society, it has moved beyond individual societies, and entered the global arena. Knowledge, technological developments, services, people, are moving across national borders and globalization has become the byword of the times.
There are many ways of looking at globalization. I would like to call your attention to its impact in terms of linking the local to the distant in a routine manner, that is, the way in which social relations become disembedded, i.e., “lifted out” of local contexts and restructured across “indefinite spans of time-space” . Higher education has always been a case in point in terms of disembeddedness, but it has acquired a new dimension due to the rapid expansion of the internationalization of professional markets.
UNESCO has already recognized that globalization is a multiple process with important consequences for higher education : Access, regulation, mobility and the recognition of credentials are issues that have emerged with unprecedented force, and even if they have been present in the higher education debate for a long time, they have acquired new meanings and especially, new implications.
Thus, now nation-states are not the sole providers of higher education, and the academic community does not hold the monopoly of educational decision making.
The issues of quality assurance and recognition in a global perspective have moved to center stage. Issues such as standard setting, capacity building, international trade or the role of institutions and academic staff are important if we want higher education to be responsive to the needs of the members of our society, and if we do not want to be left standing in the sidewalk in the globalization process.
I come from a country which, from a different cultural background, faces problems similar to yours. We have tried to build regional commitments, to enable us to go beyond national borders, but in order to do this, we have had to strengthen our national systems.
Three components of a globalized higher education
I would like to argue that before discussing effectively the ways to implement procedures leading to social recognition of credentials, or developing standards, there are some issues that should be taken into account. I would like to focus my comments on these: the issues of trust, quality and standards.
Trust as a an essential social requirement
The first one is that of trust. If we really want to make headways in recognition, want to enhance mobility and to assure the credibility of higher education credentials, the most important factor is the ability to trust one another.
Trust is the expectation that grows within a given community that behaviour will be honest and coo