Largely a matter of degrees: Quality assurance and Canadian universities

There is no national accreditation or quality assurance mechanism for Canadian higher education. This paper argues that a number of structural characteristics that emerged as a function of the transition to mass higher education have served to stymie the development of government quality assurance mechanisms, including the decentralization of higher education policy, the development of a relatively homogeneous university sector, and the limited policy capacity of provincial ministries. The development of new types of degrees, combined with an expansion of degree-authority to new institutional types have led to the emergence of new quality mechanisms in several provinces designed to assess the quality of new degrees, but it is the universities that continue to play the central role in terms of quality assurance.