This text aims to present the first results of an investigation on higher education quality. The analyses were developed on a material gathered from interviews, applied both personally and by e- mail, with provosts from twelve different Brazilian universities. Its focus is on the relations among the concept of higher education quality, the indexes of this quality, and some instances of actions that could ratify this condition. Principles from Bardin's content analysis allowed us to gather, through the description of the contents of the messages, some indexes that helped us to infer knowledges related to the conditions in which the messages were produced and demonstrated a lack of clarity on what higher education quality is from the perspective of the institutions; their submission to a market- oriented thought; the existence of a void between intention and action; and an individualized and pointed view on quality instead of an institutional and systemic one, as would be desirable.
Higher education; Graduate teaching; University administration; Learning quality