THEQC Becomes ENQA Affiliate

The THEQC’s affiliation application to the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA) was approved by the ENQA Board on 21 February 2019. Expediting its efforts for membership, the Council has successfully completed the affiliation procedure by meeting the required criteria in a short period.  

ENQA, an umbrella organization for quality assurance organizations in Europe, promotes cooperation in Europe in the field of quality assurance in higher education and disseminates information and expertise among its members and stakeholders to develop and share good practice and to improve the European dimension of quality assurance. 

The THEQC President Prof. Dr. Muzaffer Elmas has issued a statement on the Council’s ENQA affiliation: 

“As we maintain our endeavors for establishing a system and activities of education and external evaluation, one of the primary goals of our Council is to become members of and cooperate with notable higher education quality organizations across the world. For this purpose, we have organized meetings with a number of international quality agencies and organizations including QAA (Britain), Hcéres (France), AQAS (Germany), AACSB (United States) and FIBAA (Germany) to discuss cooperation opportunities. In the meetings, we evaluated practices and cooperation possibilities in quality assurance, institutional external evaluation and program accreditation in higher education. We will continue our cooperation efforts with the United States, Korea and Japan.”  

Stating that the global context is in constant change and there are considerable alignments and resemblances in quality criteria, Prof. Dr. Elmas went on his words as follows: “Globalization and digitalization are among the leading values of the rapidly changing world. Parallel to this change, many agencies across the world have started forming nationwide and regional alliances, which is evolving into a system in which all quality criteria will be interrelated and in touch with each other. There are of course certain regional differences in this system as a result of internationalization.” 

 “Quality and accreditation in fact constitute the leading instruments of internationalization. If a university can carry out a self-evaluation according to international criteria (academic staff, facilities, institutional support, decision-making mechanisms, continuous improvement plans etc.), it will be recognized anywhere in the world. Likewise, if a program is able to perform a self-evaluation with international evaluation processes, it can establish relations and exchange information with anywhere in the world. As the Higher Education Quality Council of Turkey, we make suggestions that will be helpful in the process of adapting to international standards while evaluating our universities, and provide them with guidance by drawing a roadmap with our annual reports.” Prof. Dr. Elmas said. 

The Council has so far completed the external evaluation of 115 universities, and plans to complete the evaluation of the remaining 45 universities, after which all the universities in Turkey that produce graduates will have been evaluated.