RA equivalent for UK and SA uni's

What would be the RA equivalent for UK and SA schools? I have heard something about the "Royal Charter" and then something about the CHEA (I hope I have gotten the initials correct).

Can anyone enlighten me on this? Thanks!

 

In the UK, schools with a Royal Charter, or who operate based on an act of Parliament, are generally considered comparable to RA in the U.S. And since universities can't operate in Britain without one of these, you're pretty safe. (But caution: some fake schools operate from Britain while claiming the right to do so from some other jurisdiction--these are not comparable to RA.)

In South Africa, schools recognized by the government are considered comparable to RA. Universities and technikons.

If you have any questions about a particular school, post it here and you'll get plenty of guidance. Again, some schools try to pose as British Univerisities, but you can always tell they're not, even from their own web pages.

 

Any organisation that is a "recognised body" would certainly be equivalent to RA.

There are also listed bodies, which do not award their own degree (as they do not have degree awarding power), instead awarding the degrees of regonised bodies. Note that these institutions are not necessarily second class, and include most (if not all) of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, as well as the member institutions of the University of Wales.

Any institution that is a recognised body is certainly considered equivalent to RA, any that is a listed body may be (They probably are, but I am not entirely certain about that).

Edit: With the listed bodies, it is a good idea to ensure that a particular program is awarded by a recognised body ("validated" by the recognised body) to ensure RA equivalence.

 

You could probably bash around in this site for a bit. It's the South African Department of Education.
http://education.pwv.gov.za
As Rich said, do a little reading and then come back with questions. There's lots to know but you don't have to reinvent the wheel.
Jack

 

Wouldn't work done at a "listed body" eventually result in a degree award by a "recognized body"?

 

There's a short answer and a long answer.

The short nswer is to look here:

http://www.dfes.gov.uk/recognisedukdegrees/wcoukd.shtml

If a school is on these lists, then it's a legitimate British higher education establishment. If it isn't, then it isn't. Simple.

While there are some legitimate foreign universities operating branch campuses in Britain, be aware that the UK is perhaps the world's most notorious degree-mill haven right now. There are countless bogus schools operating out of British addresses on the basis of an off-shore business registration. The British government seemingly has no interest in their activities.

The long answer:

A 'royal charter' is a legal instrument that authorizes a British university to operate. I believe that acts of parliament are alternative ways to accomplish that.

(And it's possible for British residents to simply ignore the laws requiring university charters, register their purported "university" as an off-shore business somewhere else, and happily operate their "university" from a British mail-drop "campus" with enough "Oxbridge" pomp and olde English "tradition" to choke a mule, all the while claiming in the small print that they aren't really offering UK degrees at all.)

While many American universities and employers treat British royal charters as if they were the equivalent of accreditation, technically that's not quite correct. After all, most American unaccredited degree-granting schools do operate legally in their states and in that sense they do have the functional equivalent of a charter.

Here in the United States, accreditation is a quality assurance measure. It refers to the inspections that colleges and universities receive to help insure that they are credible. It doesn't refer to a school's legal authorization to grant degrees.

In practice, it's much harder to obtain a royal charter in the UK than it is to receive state-approval here in California. So initially at least, a lot of the accreditation function is just kind of built into the chartering process. A bogus school doesn't have much chance of getting its initial charter.

But once British universities were up and running, they traditionally were pretty autonomous in setting their own standards. What's more, they could extend their degree granting powers to other schools as they saw fit, creating little constellations of colleges around them, all teaching programs leading to their degrees. Whether or not those affiliated schools were credible wasn't always clear. (We basically had to take the university's word for it.)

External quality assurance was mostly exercised by the higher education funding councils who wanted public funds going to the most worthy programs. So the funding councils gradually started performing their own teaching and research assessments.

In the 1990's there were calls to streamline and rationalize the system, most notably in the massive Dearing Report. One of the Dearing recommendations was to create a national external quality control body for higher educaion.

That body was duely started and named the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA). So technically, the QAA is the closest British equivalent to an American accreditor. My impression is that all the schools that are chartered to award British degrees, and all the affiliate schools that teach programs leading toward the award of one of those British degrees, come under mandatory QAA perview. (Which apparently is what connects the long answer to the short answer up above.)

The QAA are the people that perform periodic site-visits and the other stuff that we expect accreditors to do. They provide both broad institutional evaluations as well as subject specific inspections of particular departments. In other words, the QAA kind of combines the function of American institutional and specialized accreditors. (There are some independent specialized accreditors in the UK as well, in certain fields. The AMBA does business schools, for example.)

Here's the QAA:

http://www.qaa.ac.uk

A QAA practice that I really like a lot and think that the Americans should copy is their posting summaries of their findings on their website. You can go to the QAA and read precisely what their team thought of Liverpool Hope University or whatever your interest is. You will read about weaknesses and strengths, things that need work and things that deserve praise. The QAA institution-specific reports are here:

http://www.qaa.ac.uk/reviews/reports/instIndex.asp