Examining the Criteria for Accreditation and Measuring of Higher Education Institutions with an Emphasis on Their Rankings

Comparative studies have proven that higher education institutions will be successful if they enjoy a consistent and disciplined institutional accreditation system. A prerequisite for such a system is having appropriate criteria and internal evaluation of higher education institutions. The purpose of this paper is to examine how good these criteria and indexes and also internal evaluation of higher education institutions are as an essential prerequisite for their rankings. In addition to studying the higher education accreditation in different countries around the world, this article used a descriptive, analytical-comparative method to examine the criteria and indexes applied internationally and also compared different rankings across the world. Then, according to our country’s situation, a pattern composed of appropriate criteria and indexes was provided to the reader. The results indicated that the more higher education institutions put an emphasis on the role that accreditation and internal evaluation play in improvement of the quality of higher education, on the institutionalizing the culture of accreditation and measuring in the higher education institutes, on the familiarity of the administrators and decision makers in higher education systems with the use of motivational tools and granting privileges and rewards to the faculty and students, the more successful they will be.