Institutional accreditation and factors of university quality in Chile Acreditación institucional y factores de la calidad universitaria en Chile

Abstract

Accreditation in Chile is the main policy instrument for quality assurance of higher education. At the institutional level, it considers a diversity of factors, but it does not use standardized measurements neither it differentiates the weight of each one of them in the evaluation. The relationship between Chilean universities' accreditation results and quantitative factors of institutional quality for the areas of information management, academic faculty, and selectivity is discussed. Variables differentiating universities in these areas are entered in regression models that explain accreditation results. It is obtained that selectivity has more explanatory capacity, whereas academic faculty has less weight on accreditation outcomes. To conclude, it is proposed that the revision of institutional accreditation procedures in Chile should give more importance to the number and quality of academics hired by universities.