A Decade of Research and Practice in the Evaluation of Higher Education

Abstract

　 In 1998, just at the time when the Japanese Association for Higher Education Research（JAHER）was founded, the revision of university establishment criteria became the central point and the main driving force in a policy switch in Japanese higher education from a focus on regulation to a focus on competition. At the same time, emphasis was put at a policy level on self-evaluation, and the resulting imposition of compulsory self-evaluation and the speed of moves toward compulsory third-party evaluation suggested that decisions were being made without adequate forethought. In the face of these trends, researchers in higher education sounded alarm signals and stressed the need for caution. On the one hand, importance was attached to the need for quality assurances, while on the other hand, the links between university evaluation and financial distribution mechanisms were strengthened, with the result that in the context of tremendous pressure on autonomous evaluation by universities, researchers had no option but to try and solve the problems of evaluation by adopting a technological approach. It can be reasonably expected that the actual progress and practical application of university evaluations from now on will encourage Japanese university educators to change their ideas about university evaluation and treat it as a matter of course, and at the same time serve to develop education oriented toward outcome assessment and the study of higher education generally.