This paper argues that economic globalization, capitalist and informational imposes significant changes to higher education, especially changes concerning institutional missions and displacements of central references: from the humanities to technical disciplines, and from society to market. These changes bring out the centrality of issues of quality in educational policy and practice. The ideology of neoliberal accumulation imposes on higher education the function of powering the economy through the production and transmission of useful and instrumental knowledge, generally of technical or computer based nature. This ideological trend, increasingly more hegemonic in international evaluation and accreditation systems, relates quality to compliance with the fulfillment of the strategic roles of higher education in the current phase of the global economy. Against this current and upholding the primacy of ethics, pertinence and social relevance, the paper argues that quality should be referred to the central purposes of higher education: the projects and processes of emancipation of individuals and human communities in all dimensions, the integral education of citizens and professionals with knowledge and values that are fundamental to social life and to the building of societies that are economically and culturally developed.
Higher education; Quality; Evaluation; Technological innovation; Relevance