Background and context of the initiative

UNESCO CEPES

he advent of mass higher education during the past decade has opened up opportunities for more people than ever before to benefit from post-secondary learning in order to contribute meaningfully to knowledge societies around the world. With this increasing demand for higher education has come an increase in supply, with traditional higher education institutions enrolling new students, establishing new and diverse study programmes, courses and modules, as well as the creation of new learning pathways and study modes.

There is now increasingly a need to look beyond the internal quality environments in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and to take seriously not only student and learning quality, but the quality of graduates, their ability to make a qualitative contribution to society, and to their personal professional fulfillment. Following the careers and choices of graduates provides HEIs with vitally important feedback and input to the continuous development of curricula across all disciplines, feedback which is equally as essential for any institutional quality assurance process as student and internal stakeholder tracking. It is just as important for HEIs as part of their whole institutional QA processes to maintain contact with and get feedback from their graduates of history, medicine, engineering, education, drama, languages, etc., the experiences of whom, in whatever career paths they eventually follow, provides an institution with an important (yet often overlooked) second or external dimension of data on which to steer its institutional short, medium and long term strategies.