International assessment for top varsities

An international educationstandard assessment programme is to be given a trial in Thai higher education institutions soon in an effort to improve their quality.

The Higher Education Commission (Hec) hopes that the USbased Baldrige National Quality Programme will lead to higher quality in Thai higher education and this will benefit the government's goal of making Thailand a regional education hub.

The trial will involve the country's leading universities, who will be asked to lift their quality according to trials using the Baldrige system.

The programme was initiated to assess organisations in the United States in order to enhance their competitiveness, quality and productivity. The Baldrige framework has been recognised in more that 70 countries, including in Thailand, where it is already known in the business and medical sectors.  

The Higher Education Commission now plans to expand the framework to apply to education.

The director of the commission's Bureau of Standards and Evaluation, Varaporn Sihanart, said that few higher education institutions in Thailand reached international standards or were accepted internationally. The Office of National Education Standards and Quality Assessment (ONESQA) makes only local quality assessments, but the Baldrige framework is accepted internationally, she said.

"It's very hard to pass all seven categories of the programme's criteria for performance excellence. However, we need to start. If we do it seriously, I believe we'll develop our higher education quickly.

"Being accepted internationally will benefit the educationhub policy. It will be easier to exchange students. Our education quality has to be higher than it is now, if Thailand wants to be an education hub," she said.

A member of the Board of Examiners for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, Professor Luis Maria R Calingo, said the Baldrige framework was an internationally recognised standard for the business sector, and had been used in more than 70 countries. Because of this, he thought the framework could help Thailand to attract more students.

He introduced the programme to about 40 presidents, vice presidents and deans from leading government and private universities at Siam City Hotel last week. 

He said the University of California, Berkeley, Howard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Wisconsin, Madison and many other US universities used the Baldrige framework.

"Monfort College of Business (MCB) at the University of Colorado, as a Baldrige award recipient in 2004, had a significant increase in the percentile scores of its students, especially after they implemented the Baldrige framework. The figure was a 24percentile increase in 11 years through their implementation of the Baldrige framework," Calingo said.

The Higher Education Commission will invite leading universities to take part in trialling the framework and to consider adjusting some parts of the criteria to better suit the Thai context over the next one or two months. They will implement the trial for one and a half years, after which the commission expects to have criteria that suit Thai universities, Varaporn said.

Engineering, education, business administration, health sciences and social sciences faculties will be the first to be invited to join the project.

Varaporn said universities would be required to evaluate their organisational profile and to undertake selfassessments before beginning to study the seven Baldrige categories.

"If these universities want to compete for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, and are well enough qualified in the future, Hec will be pleased to support them," she said.

Khon Kaen University (KKU)'s vice president for planning, Rangsan Niamsanit, said the international assessment system would not leave any queries. It would not be the same as an evaluation by the local assessment system. Therefore, the assessment would be accepted.

"It will make our personnel busier when implementing the Baldrige framework, but KKU will take part in this project. We have to do it step by step. KKU will let its Faculties of Medicine, Engineering and Management Sciences join the project as the first group," he said.

Mahidol University's vice president for education, Asst Professor Sunanta Vibuljan, said she would look into the details of the project because she was afraid her university would probably have problems adjusting itself.

"There are so many categories of assessment criteria, including those of Hec, ONESQA and the Office of the Public Sector Development Commission. I would like Hec to organise a forum to discuss and consider the various criteria with university executives before asking them to make a decision," she said.