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Home > Policy > White Paper, Notice, Announcement > White Paper > FY2003 White Paper on Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology >Part1 Chapter4 Section2.2

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Part 1   Higher Education to Support a Knowledge-Based Society Full of Creative Vitality - New Developments in Higher Education Reform
Chapter 4   Higher Education Reform in Other Countries
Section 2   United States
2   Quality Assurance That Addresses Diversity


With these kinds of expansion and diversity of higher education, the big issue is how to assure its quality. The US started working early on countermeasures for this issue.

To address the increased enrollment of students with diverse academic abilities, including adults who have been away from academics for a long period of time, with respect to the assurance of educational quality, universities have implemented since the 1960s supplementary education that cultivates basic abilities and skills such as those in the English language (writing and reading comprehension) and mathematics that are necessary for taking courses. As of 2000, 99.7 percent of two-year state universities and 81.7 percent of four-year state universities had supplementary education courses in place.

The standard accreditation system (accreditation) for universities, which is carried out by private evaluation organizations set up in each region, has played an extremely important role in maintaining the quality of American universities. Accreditation in its current form was established at the beginning of the 1950s, and evaluates whether a university has overall quality in terms of curricula, teachers, educational conditions (facilities, etc.), etc. Although it is a private system, a school without accreditation is not recognized by society as a university. Recently, new issues for accreditation have emerged, including the appearance of universities difficult to evaluate under usual criteria, such as on-line colleges that do not have campuses.

Library on the campus of Columbia University, New Tork

At the same time, from the standpoint of holding state universities that use taxpayers' money accountable to students and residents, state governments are also carrying out university evaluations. Since Tennessee started the trend in the late 1970s, more and more states have followed suit. As of 2003, 46 states have been carrying out university evaluations, with about one-third of them reflecting evaluation results in part of their budget allocations.

In addition, a precondition for these evaluations is the guarantee of the university's own authority. In the US, a university's board of directors, which is the organization within the school concerned with administration, has corporate status in the case of private universities and state universities in many states. Through this status, an environment is developed for working to improve and vitalize education and research independently from the state through the university's own originality and ingenuity. Universities and teachers are also vying for the abundant research funds that the federal government makes available. This competition in itself can also be said to lead to improved quality.

Regarding cooperation between universities and industry, with the Bayh-Dole Act (1980), which recognized the fruits of research (patents) developed at universities using federal government research subsidies as assets owned by the universities, as the impetus, venture activities centered on universities became brisk. Silicon Valley and other "industrial clusters," or concentrations of related industries in the vicinity of universities, were formed, and many venture * businesses spun off from the universities where the research was performed, with the universities and the teachers as the shareholders.


* Venture

A new enterprise that is established based on original research results of a university, etc.


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