<Article>The Roles and Challenges of "National Authority for Quality Assurance and Accreditation in Education (NAQAAE)" in Egyptian Higher Education

This paper aims at clarifying the roles and challenges of "National Authority for Quality Assurance and Accreditation in Education (NAQAAE)" in Egyptian higher education sector. In Arab states, national quality assurance agencies have been established since the late 1990s, and also in Egypt, NAQAAE was established in 2007 to assure and improve the quality of all education sectors, not only higher education but also k-12 education. However, Egyptian higher education structure is complicated; it holds public universities, private universities, public/private technical institutions and Al-Azhar University (Islamic religious educational institutions). Under such situation, in this paper, it investigated the kinds of roles and challenges NAQAAE has in Egyptian higher education. Clarifying the roles and challenges of NAQAAE will be meaningful for better understanding of Egyptian higher education and future collaboration between Egyptian and Japanese higher education institutions. As a result, NAQAAE tries to integrate the quality of higher education institutions through accreditation with institutional evaluation and evaluation by academic discipline. However, there are some challenges. Each public university is so large that it is difficult for them to deal with institutional evaluation. In addition, for higher education institutions, there are less clear incentive for accreditation, because students' enrollment size is designed by Egyptian government and accreditation by NAQAAE itself doesn't influence students' enrollment so much. Centralized administration is the characteristic of Egyptian higher education, and NAQAAE tries to integrate the quality of higher education institutions through accreditation. However, government control itself disturbs the prevalence of quality assurance of higher education institutions