Post-secondary education has become a key driver of national economies, according to Susan Robertson of Bristol University, the keynote speaker at the Harry Crowe Foundation conference on accountability and quality in post-secondary education, held in Toronto in January.

In 2008, international students spent an estimated $6.5 billion on education in Canada — a figure greater than the revenue generated by exporting softwood lumber and coal. Canada’s education sector was also responsible for generating 83,000 jobs from its international student activities. The importance of international students to the Canadian economy is a relatively recent phenomenon. Between 1998 and 2005, the number of full-time international students in Canada nearly doubled, from 78,256 to 152,762, and the cash flow from these students ballooned from $1.7 to $3.8 billion.

With an emerging multibillion dollar market for international higher education, nations aggressively compete to export educational services. Robertson points to the tendency for trade to replace aid, as countries vie to establish branch plants, sell more services and attract more students. A similar mentality motivates our federal and provincial governments to encourage universities to compete with each other for research funding, scholars and resources, in the race to achieve “world class” standing.

This expansion of international education fuels new demands for accountability and quality assurance. A key issue is how to compare educational qualifications across national borders. In Europe, the Bo-logna Process for “creating the European Higher Education area” involves 46 nations. Pushed by the OECD and World Bank, there are efforts to develop common standards and practices to compare institutions in all the OECD countries, notably the Assessment of Higher Education Outcomes.

In January the United States agreed to participate with five other countries in a feasibility study to develop common measures on “generic skills,” and frameworks in economics and engineering.

The new market ideology with its principles of efficiency, competitiveness and productivity also affects quality assessments at the level of individual institutions. Traditionally, academic staff have played a central and autonomous role in defining the quality of teaching and research, but as post-secondary education becomes more oriented to the marketplace, traditional measures of quality are being eroded.

Eager to develop comparative capacity, governments increasingly call for common, quantified standards and measures. There is a shift from traditional measures like faculty/student ratios, library holdings, research publications and citations to “learning outcomes,” such as student engagement, increased skills, retention rates and job success. “Engagement” is measured by surveys such as “Nessie” — the U.S.-based National Survey of Student Engagement.

Academic staff have a fundamental stake in accountability and assessment. Scholarly quality has traditionally been a matter for peer review exercised through hiring procedures, tenure and promotion and for purposes of research funding and publication. Tenure and promotion in particular stands out as a lengthy and rigorous review, if little understood by those outside of academia.

Thomas Docherty, of the University of Warwick, told the conference in Toronto that the danger in peer review is the endless pressure to raise standards. Too often this pressure comes from peers eager to “join the bandwagon of standards” and who become their own tormenters. This has resulted in a diminished academic culture.

Gary Rhoades, a higher education professor at the University of Arizona and general secretary of the American Association of Univer­sity Professors, continued with this theme. He argued that academic staff are deeply enmeshed in assessment practices and challenged conference delegates to think critically.

Among the questions we should address, he said, are: Do tenuring practices restrict academic freedom? Do our institutions support freedom of expression or is there a climate of retaliation? And, what is the role of academic staff in producing and sustaining institutions that deeply embody race, class and gender inequality? He urged us to find a way that evaluation could promote academic freedom and reminded us that high-quality education cannot be achieved without institutional commitment to good working conditions.

The conference offered an inadvertent object lesson in the perils of “accountability.” Two invited speakers, who are senior professors at universities in Mexico, declined to attend because of the new onerous standards required to obtain visitor visas to enter Canada. Not only did the visa office require proof of employment, which has been the practice for many years, but also evidence of assets in Mexico, original bank documents showing financial history, an account of travel since the age of 18, and a list of every job held since age 18, including names and addresses of employers.