The Importance Of Quality Assurance Standards

Accreditation is essentially responsible for ensuring that the quality standards in higher education are achieved. Accreditation is therefore part of the change process that seeks to make the higher education institutions more credible and improve the quality of their learning while enhancing their level of competitiveness (Alghamdi, 2016). The education institutions have responded to the call of the quality standards in a bid to improve their competitiveness.

Accreditation is also suitable in introducing changes relating to the institutional policies and the members involved as well as the educational products that will be offered in those institutions.

Quality Assurance standards are also necessary in ensuring adaptability to changing

environments

The purpose of the assurance efforts is to ensure that the international standards that guide the quality purpose in the tertiary institutions are observed.

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A background of higher education in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia Kingdom came into existence in 1932. The country started poor with educational programs only consisting of around 12 schools with an approximate of 700 students (

Alamri, 2011). More schools were consequently established with the discovery of oil in the

Kingdom at around 1938. The number of schools grew to 365, with an estimate of 42,000 students attending them in 1950 (Simmons & Simmons, 1994). After the introduction of the

Ministry of Higher Education in Saudi in 1954, it was deemed appropriate to introduce the tertiary institutions of learning to end the practice of sending the Saudi students for their university education abroad. This move led to the establishment of the King Saud University in the Riyadh city in 1957.

The push for the attainment of the education goals for the girl child began with the creation of King Saud University. With support from the society’s elite religious scholars, the efforts to educate women in higher institutions of education bore fruit when the first

The role of the women in the tertiary education has also gained significance with the increase in the number of the female tutors, who had risen to 19600 by 2008/2009 academic year (Alhareth, Dighrir & Alhareth, 2015). There was segregation of genders attending the education institutions in the past but the modern emphasis requires that there should be equity in terms of the access to the education opportunities for both males and the females. The Islam religion has also come up to support8 the idea of the need of education acquisition by the female child. However, the male dominated society continues to pose serious challenges to the girl child education, whereby the female students are required to be accompanied by their guardians while attending public institutions and having to send a male representative to get them educational materials from public libraries where they are denied

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