An Analysis of Quality Challenges of Higher Education; Case: The Fifth Development Plan

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Professor, Department of Management, Tarbiat Modares University

2 Assistant Professor, Development Research Institute, University Jihad

3 Associate Professor, Tarbiat Modares University

Abstract

Recent trends in the country show that the higher education system faces serious challenges related to quality. The government often through public policies is in charge of planning and implementation of suitable plans to remove these challenges. The Second Chapter of the Fifth Development Plan deals with higher education policies. On the basis of scientific principles, these plans should be based on proper understanding of causal relations and links. System Dynamics is a useful method which facilitates the analysis of policies based on these relations. Due to certain reasons such as lack of integrated information sources and difficulty of measuring qualitative relations, such analyses have not been conducted with regard to the Fifth Development Plan. The present article is an attempt to analyze the challenge of quality of higher education in the Fifth Development Plan through system dynamics approach in order to assist the improvement of the processes of public policymaking and their implementation. Hence, the main variables related to the quality have been identified by relying on the experts views and are used as a basis for modeling and identification of causal links. The findings of the analyses show that there is lack of attention to time delays in some plans which has caused ineffectiveness of most of the plans, particularly with regard to the relationship between industry and university, employment of graduates and business skills. The fluctuating behavior of qualitative variables is one of the expected reasons of this inattention and hence some measures should be taken to solve this problem. Some of these measures have been proposed as suggestions of this study.

Keywords