STUDENT INVOLVEMENT IN QUALITY ASSURANCE IN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS: PRACTICE AND EXPERIENCES AT THE UNITED STATES INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY-AFRICA

Abstract

The success of Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) is hinged on the quality of graduates they channel into the society. The growing concern about the declining employability of graduates of HEIs places a high threshold on the quality of education and training HEIs offer. Moreover, education regulatory bodies have enshrined quality assurance (QA) as a requirement for HEIs. Consequently, HEIs are increasingly embedding robust quality assurance systems in their processes for continuous institutional improvement. Despite the critical role stakeholders play in enhancing quality in HEIs, several challenges hinder the entrenchment of a culture of involving stakeholders in QA in most of these HEIs. The challenges include recruitment of stakeholders to take part in QA processes, stakeholder disinterest, inadequate QA competences in stakeholders, utilization of stakeholder input, and assessing the value of their involvement for institutional improvement. As a matter of fact, HEIs have a wide array of stakeholders ranging from internal stakeholders - students, employees, managers to external stakeholders - parents, employers regulatory bodies, government and the general public. The aforementioned have a stake in the performance of the HEIs hence their concern about quality. Without gainsaying, students comprise the largest stakeholders and are direct beneficiaries of educational institutions hence their involvement in QA is of paramount importance. Cognizant of this, United States International University-Africa (USIU-Africa) has, over the years, continuously engaged students, both current and alumni, at various levels, in her QA processes. Adopting a mixed methods research design, this study, rooted in the stakeholder theory, describes the engagement of students and alumni in USIU-Africa’s QA processes. Precisely, the paper interrogates six key issues: What QA processes are students involved in? What role(s) do students play in these QA processes? How are they involved in these QA processes? To what extent is students’ input utilized in improving quality? How adequately are students prepared to take part in QA processes? To what extent has student involvement in QA processes been effective? What challenges, if any, impede student involvement in QA? Document analyses and interviews with key informants are used to collect data for the study. Data is analysed and thematically interpreted in line with the research questions. Based on the findings, the study concludes that students are involved in QA processes, and students themselves nominate their representatives QA teams who are trained in a number of QA related topics. Although student involvement is viewed as valuable to HEIs, it is yet to be effective due to a myriad of challenges. Hence HEIs should enhance awareness creation by wide dissemination of QA activities, build the capacity of internal stakeholders, motivate students to embrace QA, and mainstream QA content in the common courses.
Keywords: Higher educational institutions, quality assurance, QA processes, stakeholders, student involvement.