QUALITY ASSURANCE IN UNIVERSITIES OF DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: THE CASE OF TUNISIAN HIGHER EDUCATION

Tunisia's transition to a knowledge-based economy has created a growing demand for highly skilled jobs. The challenge of higher education in Tunisia has been to rapidly supply the job market with the skilled workforce. At the dawn of the twenty first century and in order to face this challenge, the higher education sector undertook a number of unplanned reform projects to raise the quality of education and training. Three main reform projects have been in place: Introducing the LMD (Licence, Master and Doctorate) system, building new universities in poor areas with low infrastructure, and creating new professional bachelors and masters that are supposed to answer the job market needs in terms of qualified and skilled workforce. I qualify these reform projects as unplanned because they led to opposite expectation as they led to a worse quality of the higher education sector. Besides, the higher education sector was faced with another major challenge which consists in effectively facing the rapid movement from elite to mass education system. As a result, the sector failed in attaining quality due to the growing number of students and the negative impact of the unplanned reform projects, mainly the failure to employ half a million graduates. This paper evaluates the reform projects undertaken by the higher education sector and tries to understand the reasons behind their failures. It offers an action plan to attain quality in higher education. It also makes recommendations to how reform projects can go hand in hand with the quality assurance target of the higher education sector. This paper recommends the following: In order to make a successful transition to a knowledge-based economy and thrive in employing the right skilled university graduate in the right job, higher education sector needs to promote governance and leadership in public universities, encourage autonomy in academic decision-making and ban politicized leadership in higher education. These actions will lead to both equity and quality in higher education and pave the way to quality assurance and the development of a higher education sector that is capable of producing skilled human force that can increase competitiveness in a Euro-Mediterranean open market.