Quality Assurance in Higher Education: How Universities Are Accredited Around the World

Trends & data · By the Open Quad editorial team · Published 2026-10-07

A black-and-white view from above of students studying at tables in a modern university library reading room — Students in the Walter H. Rubsamen Music Library reading room, University of California, Los Angeles. Photo: UCLA Library University Archives, Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

Every serious higher education system has some way of checking that universities do what they claim: that programmes are well designed, teaching is competent, assessment is fair and degrees mean something. These systems, grouped under the term quality assurance, decide whether a degree is recognised at home and abroad. They have also been one of the main areas of work in university partnerships for development.

Internal and external quality assurance

Internal quality assurance is what an institution does itself: approving new programmes, reviewing them periodically, collecting student feedback, using external examiners, monitoring results and acting on them. External quality assurance is carried out by an agency outside the institution, which may accredit (give a yes-or-no decision), audit (check that internal processes work) or assess (grade quality). Most systems combine both, and the better external systems focus on whether institutions have working internal processes rather than inspecting every detail.

The United States: accreditation

US higher education has no national ministry that approves universities. Instead, private, non-profit accrediting organisations review institutions and programmes. Institutional accreditors review whole colleges and universities; programmatic accreditors review professional programmes such as medicine, engineering, nursing and business. The US Department of Education "recognises" accreditors whose accreditation makes institutions eligible for federal student aid, and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), founded in 1996, recognises accreditors through its own process. In 2020, federal rules removed the formal distinction between "regional" and "national" accreditors, which are now all called institutional accreditors.

Europe: the ESG and the Bologna Process

Date	Milestone
1999	Bologna Declaration launches the European Higher Education Area
2000	European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA) founded
2005	Ministers adopt the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG)
2008	European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education (EQAR) created
2015	Revised ESG adopted at the Yerevan ministerial conference

The ESG set common standards for internal quality assurance, for external reviews and for the agencies themselves. Agencies that comply can be listed on EQAR, and their review reports are gathered in the DEQAR database, which students can search.

Africa and other regions

In Africa, national bodies such as Nigeria's National Universities Commission (established in 1962) and Kenya's Commission for University Education (created under the Universities Act of 2012) license and accredit universities and programmes. At continental level, the African Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ASG-QA), developed with African Union and European Union support through the HAQAA initiative, were adopted in 2018, and the African Quality Rating Mechanism lets institutions assess themselves against common criteria. Regional networks exist in Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Arab States, and the International Network for Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education (INQAAHE), founded in 1991, links agencies worldwide.

Quality assurance and partnerships

Helping a partner university or country set up quality assurance has been a common goal of development partnerships: drafting internal review procedures, training reviewers, preparing institutions for external accreditation, and supporting national agencies. Joint and double degrees and transnational programmes, such as branch campuses, raise particular questions, because more than one system's rules apply. UNESCO and the OECD published Guidelines for Quality Provision in Cross-border Higher Education in 2005 to address these.

What it means for students

Recognition. A degree from an unaccredited or unrecognised institution may not be accepted by employers, other universities or immigration authorities (see credential evaluation).
Funding. In the US, only students at institutions accredited by a recognised agency can receive federal student aid; scholarship programmes elsewhere apply similar rules.
Professional licensing. Regulated professions often require a degree from a programme accredited by the relevant professional body.
Information. Review reports, where published, tell you more about a programme's strengths and weaknesses than any ranking (see how to choose a university abroad).

Accreditation mills

Some fake universities claim accreditation from fake agencies with official-sounding names.
Check that an accreditor is recognised by the US Department of Education or CHEA, listed on EQAR, or recognised by the national authority in the country concerned.

How an external review usually works

Although details differ, most external reviews follow the same steps, which the ESG and similar frameworks describe. The institution or programme first writes a self-evaluation report against the agency's standards, with evidence such as programme specifications, student results and feedback. A panel of peer reviewers, usually academics from other institutions, often with a student member and sometimes an international expert, reads the report and visits the institution to interview leaders, staff, students and employers. The panel writes a report with findings and recommendations, and the agency takes a decision: accreditation, accreditation with conditions, or refusal. A follow-up procedure checks that recommendations are acted on, and the cycle repeats after a fixed period, often five to seven years. Publishing reports, a requirement of the ESG, lets students and partners read the results.

Sources

US Department of Education, accreditation in the United States; CHEA.
ENQA, Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance (ESG); EQAR; European Higher Education Area.
HAQAA initiative, African Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance.
INQAAHE: inqaahe.org.
UNESCO and OECD, Guidelines for Quality Provision in Cross-border Higher Education (2005): oecd.org.