Policy cycle of higher education in Iran: trends, processes and challenges

Higher education in different societies has been receiving serious attention in order to provide expert and capable human resources and closely related to the discussion of development, and therefore requires correct and efficient policy making in this field. Our attempt in this article is to analyze the policy cycle of higher education in post-revolutionary Iran and examine the success or failure of this system. the main question of the article is what is the policy cycle of higher education in Iran and what have been the positive and negative achievements of these policies? The findings of the research indicate that educational policy making in Iran has a centralized, top-down, idealistic and ideology-oriented process in the design phase and has fundamental weaknesses in the implementation phase. Quantitative growth of universities and increase in literate population of the country, increase of educated women, establishment of Azad University and non-government universities, establishment of Payam Noor University and distance education as well as establishment of international universities are among the positive achievements of the education policy system. It has been great in Iran. the lack of independence of universities, the disproportion between the quantitative and qualitative growth of universities, the lack of active public sphere to express the opinions of stakeholders and academic experts, the prevalence of degree orientation, the incompatibility of academic disciplines with the needs of society and the labor market and The large number of unemployed academics is one of the inefficiencies of the higher education policy system in the country.