Toward Contextualized Accreditation: Reconciling Universal Quality Standards with Institutional Diversity in Higher Education

Abstract

This study suggests that a key challenge in higher education accreditation is the limited contextualization of quality standards to institutional realities. Through a scoping review of accreditation-related studies and structured interviews with academic administrators, the study develops the De Facto Accreditation Response Model (DFARM) to illustrate how universal, one-size-fits-all accreditation mandates produce compliance paradoxes, evidence deficits, and capacity gaps—particularly in resource-constrained institutions. The analysis reveals that when standards fail to account for institutional diversity in mission, resource endowment, and regional context, they force performative compliance rather than genuine quality enhancement. The study proposes contextualized accreditation as an organizing principle for policy reform, articulated through three dimensions: context-sensitive standards that reflect institutional mission and capacity, adaptive audit processes that shift from adversarial monitoring to developmental partnership, and locally-defined outcome metrics that move beyond uniform proxies to authentic measures of student competency.