Identifying the Factors Affecting the Quality of Education from the Viewpoint of Higher Education Specialists and Ph.D. Students

In recent decades, Iran's higher education system faced many challenges, including quantitativeism, financial pressures increase, centralization and multiplicity of decision-making centers, dominance politicization over higher education, increase of research unethical behaviors, lack of international communication, asynchronism between the curriculum and community needs, weakness of technological infrastructure, to say a few, which led to reduction of the quality of Iran's higher education system. Hence, now more than ever, rethinking about the structures and functions of higher education is needed. The aim of this study is to identify the factors affecting the quality of education from the viewpoint of higher education specialists as well as Ph.D. students at the Allameh Tabatabaʾi University. These factors were identified and analyzed in various levels of effectiveness through the investigation of two views .

Due to the complexity, subjective and relativity of the concept of quality in education and its dependence on the context and ground of each structure, exploratory qualitative research method has been applied for this research. Because qualitative research provides more accurate findings for a deeper understanding and interpretation of the thoughts and minds of the subjects. For this purpose, interviews with six questions were conducted using semi-structured interviews with seven higher education specialists and 19 Ph.D. students selected by purposeful and snowball sampling. The collected data, then, were analyzed using content analysis method. In the coding sequence, after reading all the interviews, the concepts for each interview were counted. Subsequently, the concepts were classified according to the differentiated and shared aspects in the form of secondary subcategories. In the third part of the coding process, subcategories were contracted on the basis of similarities and differences and formed the secondary primary categories. This process was applied separately in response to each interview question.

The findings show that the factors affecting the quality of education in the classroom level are divided into four categories: professor (academic and personality), student (educational and attitude-personality), curriculum (structural and executive), facilities and infrastructure (hard facilities and technologic-scientific). The infrastructure of science and technology). The obstacles of high-quality education in higher education also are divided into two types of inter-university (professor, student, curriculum content, and facilities and infrastructure) and outer-university (micro and macro levels). The method for removing them in order to increase the quality if higher education, according to the obstacles, were also addressed, such as: reviewing the faculty members' promotion system, expanding contacts with international communications, reconstruction of university-industry connection, improving the recruitment process of faculty members, and so on. Findings showing the role of students in improving the quality of education were also classified into two groups of internal factors (academic and attitudinal) and external factors (managerial-executive, policy). In examining the role of the curriculum in the enhancement of the quality of higher education, the findings were classified into two categories: content (structural, executive) and meta-content (managerial and policy). Based on the findings of this research, it is recommended to amend the professor's assessment system by the students and pay attention to its results for the enhancement of the performance of faculty members.