Journal of Business & Economic Policy

Czech Higher Education Policy: The Case of Accreditation
Jan Vašenda

Abstract
There has been used a programme accreditation scheme as a main tool for quality assurance in the Czech higher education. Accreditation of higher education in Czech Republic has not primarily focused on quality assurance processes but rather on the quality of input into the teaching process. Empirical evidence shows that main reasons for not granting accreditation were unsatisfactory credentials of the academic staff and issues related to the proposed programme curriculum. The recently adopted amendment of the Higher Education Act introduces changes, which could mean a closer convergence towards the models used in the Western Europe or United States. However, it is hard to predict how the new accreditation system shall work in practice especially in terms of to the approach of the accreditation officials towards various universities and specific accreditation cases. Economic policy perspectives related to accreditation process, such as unemployment, economic regulation, principal-agent problem, Gresham’s law, information asymmetry, and human capital theory are also discussed in the paper.

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