Rethinking the case of universities

A couple of weeks ago, I discussed the question whether it makes any sense to certify a university to ISO 9001. More exactly, the original context of the discussion was the question whether ISO 9001 certification could replace academic accreditation. To that narrow question I finally answered No, but I left open the possibility that ISO 9001 might have some residual utility in organizing a university's activities.

Several people commented on the post (mostly through LinkedIn), but the most detailed response came from Rasha Alkabbanie (see her LinkedIn profile here), a Lecturer in the Faculty of Engineering of Tishk International University in Erbil, Iraq, who has studied – and published on! – the applicability of ISO 9001 to university operations. Besides sharing her expertise in an extensive comment, Ms. Alkabbanie linked to an article she published in June 2020, where she compared ISO 9001:2015 with other guidelines for institutions of higher learning. In particular, she focused her comparison on a set of international standards published as the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG), (Brussels, Belgium, 2015), or "ESG 2015" for short.

The argument in Ms. Alkabbanie's paper, "ESG 2015 vs. ISO 9001:2015 Regarding Stakeholders," turns implicitly on a subtle point which I failed to consider in my own blog post. This point is that a university, like any other organization (and particularly any other large-scale organization) has to have some kind of Quality Management System underlying its operations. 

• This system does not necessarily have to be called a QMS, though clearly sometimes it is; ESG 2015, for example, makes extensive use of "quality assurance" terminology. 
• It is even possible (I suppose) that some institution might not recognize that they have such a system in place, thinking of it simply as "the way we've always done things" without taking a step back to see how all of "the things we do" fit together as a coherent system when you see the picture whole.
• But what is not possible is that an underlying QMS actually fails to exist. A QMS, after all, is just the basic organizational framework of roles and responsibilities, and of activities and controls, that allows the institution to get things done. If a university – or any organization – can keep its doors open, then one way or another it has some kind of (formal or informal) QMS.

And as soon as you recognize that a university has to have some kind of QMS, you see how ISO 9001 could apply (subject as always to my qualifications in last week's post). But please note: this does not mean that ISO 9001 can take the place of accreditation. It can never do that, because accreditation imposes specific content-based requirements related to subject-matter expertise; or to professional qualification; or to expectations from regional, national, or international bodies. These content-based requirements can never be subsumed under a generic management system standard, in the same way that every industry has its own specialized requirements not shared by others. We all know that restaurants, and electronics manufacturers, and trucking companies can all implement ISO 9001, but each one has industry-specific requirements that the others don't. In the field of education, accreditation requirements play the same role.

But in order to meet these requirements, the university has to have some kind of system for meeting requirements in general; and that system can be judged by an external standard. Pick whichever standard you like: for example, you might choose ESG 2015, or you might choose ISO 9001. And here we come to the heart of Ms. Alkabbanie's research: comparing these two. Her conclusion is that ISO 9001 is a more demanding standard than ESG 2015, because it is more comprehensive. In particular, her analysis shows that ESG 2015 is somehow a subset of ISO 9001: every requirement in ESG 2015 is matched by a requirement in ISO 9001, but the reverse is not true. There are requirements in ISO 9001 that ESG 2015 never dreams of.

Perhaps I should add that there are other applicable standards you could choose from, besides these two. ISO 21001, for example, is specifically a standard for "Management systems for educational organizations." It resembles ISO 9001 very closely, adding a number of topics that are specific to educational institutions: for example, admissions criteria, grading of student work, and policies for special-needs students. But then in the supplemental material at the end, in Annex F, ISO 21001:2018 provides a comparison between its own requirements and those of yet another standard, in this case the European Quality Assurance Framework for Vocational Education and Training (EQAVET). (As a confirmation that every educational institution has to have some kind of QMS, the EQAVET web page – just like ESG 2015 – makes heavy use of "quality assurance" terminology. It also deploys a version of the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle.)

So that's the relevance of ISO 9001 to universities: as an enabler of accreditation, not a replacement or substitute for it. And I am very grateful to Ms. Alkabbanie for her detailed comments, and for her willingness to share the results of her research, all of which helped me better understand this point.