A new session of accreditation in our campus is up. That means we will compile strategic plans, assessment reports, learning outcome documentation, meeting minutes, curriculum maps, faculty CVs formatted according to specific templates, evidence of “continuous improvement,” proof of “stakeholder engagement,” and spreadsheets demonstrating “alignment” between course objectives and program outcomes.
The process consumes dozens of hours across multiple faculty and staff. We have to create documents that will be read once by external reviewers, filed away, and likely never consulted again. We will map outcomes to outcomes to outcomes in elaborate matrices. We will write narratives describing processes we’ve been doing for years but never felt compelled to formally document.
In the meantime, is any of this actually improving education?
Accreditation arrived with good intentions but has become a prime example of how neoliberal audit culture transforms quality assurance into bureaucratic performance, genuine improvement into compliance theater, and scholarly work into “bullshit jobs.”
The Origins: Good Intentions
Accreditation in higher education began in the late 19th century as a relatively modest mechanism for quality assurance. The idea was simple: external peer review could help institutions maintain standards, provide public confidence in degrees, and prevent fraud.
These were legitimate concerns. Some form of quality assurance makes sense. Students deserve confidence that their degrees mean something. Employers need assurance that graduates have learned something. Public funding requires some accountability.
But as British anthropologist Michael Power documented in his seminal work “The Audit Society,” what began as quality assurance evolved into something quite different: an explosion of auditing technologies that “reshaped rationalities of governance and concealed neoliberal political agendas behind layers of bureaucracy and accounting” .
The Neoliberal Turn: From Improvement to Control
The transformation accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s alongside broader neoliberal reforms of public institutions. Accreditation became part of what scholars call “audit culture”—the pervasive use of performance indicators, benchmarking, and calculative practices to measure, reform, and control public sector organizations.
As Shore and Wright documented in their influential critique, audit culture derives its legitimacy from claims to enhance transparency and accountability. But its actual effects are rather different: it produces “calculable, accountable, ‘responsibilized’ and self-disciplined subjects”—the “ideal” academic in the neoliberalized university.
The proliferation of ranking and audit systems generates “a sense of permanent insecurity and the feeling that one can never quite do enough.” These anxieties produce “an increase in centralisation, loss of academic freedom, increasing workloads for academics, and all the associated health issues” .
The Workload Burden: “Bullshit Work”
A recent autoethnographic study of an Italian university’s accreditation experience described the process through the lens of “bullshit jobs”—work perceived as pointless or pernicious. The researchers argued that audit culture in higher education has “detrimental subjective and intersubjective effects” that create what they termed “bullshit work.”
What Gets Measured ≠ What Matters
Accreditation’s fundamental problem: it measures what’s easily measurable, not what actually matters.
There are currently no widely agreed upon, reliable measures of student learning or instructional quality. Instead, institutions rely on indicators that are easier to measure, but that only indirectly reflect educational quality: retention and graduation rates, time to degree, average class size, student-to-faculty ratios, student course evaluations.
Inputs (how many faculty with doctorates, library holdings, square meters of facilities) are counted because they’re countable. Student satisfaction is measured because it’s surveyable. Graduation rates are tracked because they’re trackable.
But do students actually learn critical thinking? Can they write coherently? Think independently? Engage complex problems? These things resist easy quantification and thus get marginalized in accreditation processes. The audit culture promotes a philosophy where “only that which is measurable is important”. Anything that cannot be reduced to metrics becomes suspect, devalued, eventually eliminated.
Conflicts of Interest and Capture
External program reviews and accreditation are “rife with conflicts of interest since they rely on colleagues within a particular discipline”. Peer reviewers are drawn from the same academic communities they’re evaluating, creating incentives to be collegial rather than critical.
Moreover, accreditation has become professionalized into its own industry. Agencies employ staff, charge fees, run conferences, sell consulting services. Some institutions hire “accreditation consultants” to help navigate the process—a cottage industry built on compliance theater.
The system is also subject to regulatory capture. Since accrediting agencies depend on member institutions for legitimacy and revenue, they’re incentivized not to be too demanding. Harsh judgments might alienate members. Difficult standards might cause institutions to withdraw. Better to maintain cordial relationships and focus on process compliance.
The Performative Trap
What makes accreditation particularly insidious is its performative nature. We don’t just comply—we must demonstrate compliance. We don’t just have learning outcomes: we must map them, assess them, document assessment, show how results inform improvement, then document that improvement.
The documentation becomes the reality. If it’s not written in the self-study report, it doesn’t exist. If it’s not in the assessment matrix, it didn’t happen. Scholarship, teaching, learning—the actual work of universities—become subordinate to their documentation.
The Unsustainable Model
The proliferation of accreditation and audit systems creates impossible demands. As the Kafkaesque case of British academic Stefan Collini illustrated, shifting and cumulative priorities create “incompatible demands on the individual academic’s time and energy”. Research excellence frameworks, teaching quality assessments, student satisfaction surveys, accreditation reviews—each claiming to improve quality, collectively making quality improvement impossible.
What’s the Alternative?
I’m not arguing for zero accountability or quality assurance. The question is what forms of accountability serve genuine improvement versus bureaucratic control.
Some possibilities:
Lighter-touch approaches: Less frequent reviews, simpler documentation, trust in professional judgment rather than elaborate compliance performances.
Focus on actual outcomes: If we’re going to assess, assess things that matter—not whether documentation exists but whether students learn, whether graduates contribute to society, whether research advances knowledge.
Peer learning models: Rather than audit-style reviews, collaborative exchanges where institutions learn from each other without punitive consequences.
Transparency without performance: Making information available without demanding elaborate self-studies and site visits. If we must measure, measure and publish data without the compliance theater.
Internal rather than external: Trust institutions to evaluate themselves honestly rather than performing for external reviewers.
Here are major institutional and system-level higher education accreditation/quality assurance bodies, grouped by region:
Global and meta-level bodies
- International Network for Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education (INQAAHE) – global association of 280+ quality assurance agencies.[1]
- Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) International Directory – meta-directory of 550+ ministries, QA and accreditation bodies in 170+ countries.[2][3]
- UNESCO/IAU World Higher Education Database (WHED) – global database of institutions and systems (often linking to national QA bodies).[4]
Europe
- European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA).
- European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education (EQAR).
- National QA agencies (many ENQA/EQAR members), for example:
- UK: Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA).
- Germany: multiple agencies such as ACQUIN, AQAS, AHPGS, AKAST (listed in recognized-agencies lists).[5]
- France: Haut Conseil de l’évaluation de la recherche et de l’enseignement supérieur (Hcéres).
- Netherlands–Flanders: NVAO.
- Scandinavia: UKÄ (Sweden), NOKUT (Norway), etc.
Turkey
- Higher Education Quality Council of Turkey – Yükseköğretim Kalite Kurulu (YÖKAK): national external QA and institutional accreditation body, with authority to accredit HEIs and license other accreditors.[6][7]
- Discipline-/program-specific accreditors (authorized/recognized by YÖKAK), e.g.:
United States (institutional/regional level)
Seven regional/institutional accreditors for degree-granting institutions:[8][9][10]
- Higher Learning Commission (HLC).
- Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE).
- New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE).
- Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU).
- Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC).
- WASC Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC).
- Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, WASC (ACCJC).
(Plus numerous US national and programmatic accreditors listed by US Department of Education and CHEA.)[10][11]
Americas (outside US)
Examples of major national QA bodies (details via CHEA/INQAAHE directories).[3][1][2]
- Canada: no single national accreditor; provincial quality councils (e.g., Ontario Quality Council).
- Brazil: National Institute for Educational Studies and Research (INEP) / Ministry of Education QA system.
- Mexico: Consejo para la Acreditación de la Educación Superior (COPAES) and CIEES.
- Chile: Comisión Nacional de Acreditación (CNA-Chile).
- Argentina: Comisión Nacional de Evaluación y Acreditación Universitaria (CONEAU).
Africa
Selected major national QA bodies:[1][3][2]
- South Africa: Council on Higher Education (CHE) / Higher Education Quality Committee.
- Nigeria: National Universities Commission (NUC).
- Kenya: Commission for University Education (CUE).
- Egypt: National Authority for Quality Assurance and Accreditation of Education (NAQAAE).
- Many others listed in the CHEA International Directory and INQAAHE membership lists.[3][2][1]
Asia and Pacific
- India: University Grants Commission (UGC) with National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) and National Board of Accreditation (NBA) for professional programs.[12][5]
- China: several bodies under the Ministry of Education (e.g., CHES / HEEC frameworks).
- Japan: National Institution for Academic Degrees and Quality Enhancement of Higher Education (NIAD-QE) plus certified evaluation/accreditation agencies.
- South Korea: Korean University Accreditation Institute (KUAI) and Korean Council for University Education (KCUE).
- Australia: Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA).
- New Zealand: New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA).
- Gulf states and others: national commissions/councils (e.g., Saudi NCAAA), all catalogued in CHEA’s International Directory.[2][3]
If you tell me which regions or disciplines you care most about (e.g., social sciences in Europe and MENA), I can narrow this to a more targeted, policy-facing list with URLs and basic mandate summaries.
⁂
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Network_for_Quality_Assurance_Agencies_in_Higher_Education
- https://www.chea.org/directories
- https://learnworkecosystemlibrary.com/topics/directory-of-international-quality-assurance-bodies-accreditation-bodies-ministries-of-education/
- https://iau.global/whed
- https://wikipedia.nucleos.com/viewer/wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2025-08/List_of_recognized_higher_education_accreditation_organizations
- https://eurydice.eacea.ec.europa.eu/eurypedia/turkiye/quality-assurance-higher-education
- https://www.yokak.gov.tr/documents/mevzuatlar/THE_REGULATION_ON_HIGHER_EDUCATION_QUALITY_ASSURANCE_AND_THE_THEQC2023.pdf
- https://www.accreditedschoolsonline.org/accreditation/regional/
- https://www.chea.org/regional-accrediting-organizations-accreditor-type
- https://ope.ed.gov/accreditation/agencies.aspx/
- https://www.chea.org/regional-accrediting-organizations
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recognized_higher_education_accreditation_organizations
- https://www.qahe.org/article/a-guide-to-worldwide-recognized-accrediting-agencies/
- https://www.turkak.org.tr/en/news/higher-education-Quality-council-yokak-convened-at-turkak.html
- https://icaqahe.org
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