Utilizing qualitative components of risk management as evidence on how university strategies meet QA criteria and standards

Utilizing qualitative components of risk management as evidence on how university strategies meet QA criteria and standards

Risk management (RM) in higher education is becoming a new paradigm applied to quality assurance (QA) as the appetite for regulatory compliance becomes stronger than the one for accreditation or audit processes. This paper discusses how elements of RM can be embedded within university units to provide QA agencies with evidence of performance from the perspective of how decisions are arrived at. One way of documenting decisions and subsequent actions relating to rationale for actions taken by higher education institutions (HEIs) is through the inclusion of a SWOT analysis into the risk assessment process and linking these into existing institutional evaluative frameworks. Rather than only relying on formulaic results derived from externally or internally determined thresholds to gauge and judge university actions – and hence only focusing on whether these satisfy expectations – the use of SWOT adds a qualitative component that documents how risks and tolerance parameters are identified and then monitored in relation to identified and enacted institutional decisions at the institutional, unit or subunit levels.