The Relationship between Quality of Higher Education Output and Sustainable Development based on a Systemic Approach and Development of a Conceptual Model

Education is the most effective mechanism for dealing with one of the biggest challenges of this century, i.e., sustainable development. Sustainable development needs a holistic human being with systemic thinking and interdisciplinary and intra-disciplinary vision who is informed, creative and participatory. Production of such qualified human resources needs high quality elements and factors of the educational system (input, process, output, and outcome) in line with sustainable development. Higher education and expert human resources play a key role in sustainable development of any societies. Universities, as places for study and research, should strive for sustainable development. Higher education should acquire the best way to exploit limited resources and facilities. In this article, developing a model for assuring the quality of higher education system in order to reach sustainable development based on systems approach is discussed. To reach sustainable development, we should provide coordination and interaction among the parts of development. A descriptive-analytic method, similar to library studies, is used in this article.