Quality Assurance of Higher Education From the Glonacal Agency Heuristic

Abstract

In the era of globalization, higher education acts as a player in the game, presenting a vivid picture of how the system manifests the globalizing process of a nation. This chapter takes a critical look at quality assurance of higher education in a country, Vietnam, under the impacts of international organizations. Drawing on Marginson and Rhoades's glonacal agency heuristic, the chapter aims to argue that quality assurance has been prioritized as one of the core stepping stones for Vietnam to participate in international and regional educational space. It further explains while international organizations as global actors have set the foundation for quality assurance in Vietnam and introduced neoliberal ideas into the system including institutional autonomy, decentralization and social accountability, the national tradition of state-eccentric power, and the discrepancies among local institutions divert the quality assurance system away from such neoliberal ideas. The organizations that are the focus of the chapter include the World Bank, ASEAN, and ASEAN University Network.