Collecting Feedback from Students in Ethiopian Private Higher Education Institutions (HEIS): Implication for Quality Assurance and Enhancement

Abstract

Collecting feedback from students on their experiences of higher education and publishing the information to the stakeholders has become one of the major components of quality assurance and enhancement practices. Students’ feedback can be obtained in many ways through formal and informal means. This paper examines whether private HEIs in Ethiopia possess an elaborate mechanisms for the collection of student feedback information to enhance quality as well as address accountability. The Higher Education Relevance and Quality Agency’s (HERQA’s), a national quality watchdog, institutional quality audit reports implied that collecting feedback from student is still nascent in most private institutions and the practice seems to be largely undefined, unclear and untamed. The presence of student representation on institutional bodies, open door policy, and other casual activities in the institutions is to be welcomed. However, the institutions need to move further to incorporate surveys using formal instruments in order to obtain feedback from the entire population of students and they can document the experiences of the student population in a more or less systematic way. The institutions also need to take this useful and informative feedback sufficiently seriously.