Abstract:
Since the last decades of the twentieth century, globalization has impacted the educational policies, creating a globally structured agenda for education (DALE, 2010). Around the 1980’s, the concern about evaluation appeared in national education systems. At the same time, in the case of higher education, policies of quality assurance started to be created. Those policies are considered as the first phase of the Evaluative State (AFONSO, 2013; NEAVE, 2012). In this framework, the paper analyses the current trends in evaluation of higher education on a global level, since the late twentieth century to the present, by means of three policies: the accreditation/evaluation of higher education; the international rankings of universities, and the assessment of student learning outcomes. I intend to verify whether those three policies are leading higher education to the post Evaluative State-phase (AFONSO, 2013), in which nation-states would have less autonomy than other institutions that make up the global governance of higher education (DALE, 2010).
Key words:
Quality in Higher education; Accreditation; Rankings