Globalization, massification of tertiary education, and ICT revolution have radically altered the tertiary education environment posing new challenges to governments, higher education providers and other key stakeholders in terms of relevance and credibility of provisions. With the radical alterations it became clear that the traditional means for internal and external evaluations are no longer adequate to ensure the acceptable level of tertiary education performance to meet the society development needs. Considering one of the primary roles of quality assurance in tertiary education is ensuring relevance and credibility of tertiary education provisions to the ever-changing needs of the macro world of industry, politics and society at large, more and more governments are currently prioritizing quality assurance to drive the required changes in governance of higher educatuon systems, mutual recognition across national borders, and accountability to the public in different parts of the world.

As part of its mission, the INQAAHE has undertaken a Global Study of both external and internal quality assurance developments worldwide in cooperation with the regional QA networks (e.g. ENQA, CANQATE, APQN, ANQAHE, CEENQA) in 2017–2018. The regions covered in this scoping study are as follows: Africa, the Arab Region, Asia-Pacific, Eastern and Western Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Northern America.

Global Trends in Higher Education Quality Assurance: Challenges and Opportunities in Internal and External Quality Assurance provides a comprehensive coverage of the trends and developments in higher education quality assurance as they refer to legitimacy/trust, efficiency and relevance.