Saudi Arabia attends accreditation conference in US

RIYADH: Saudi Arabia’s Education and Training Evaluation Commission, represented by the National Center for Academic Accreditation and Evaluation, or Etimad, took part in the Council for Higher Education Accreditation’s annual conference in Washington, D.C. The event was titled “Maintaining and improving quality assurance: today and tomorrow” and took place from Jan. 23-26. It was attended by about 350 experts from 56 countries.

CHEA is a US-based nonprofit organization focused on elevating the quality and standards of accreditation in higher education.

Bandar Al-Khayyal, director-general of program accreditation at Etimad, said: “Harmonization with the labor market in the ‘Jahiziya’ project that the commission is working on aims to raise the readiness of higher education graduates for the labor market.”

The Jahiziya program will help prepare university graduates to join the labor market while enhancing compatibility between program outputs and job market requirements.

“This will help raise employment indicators for university graduates and reduce unemployment rates,” Al-Khayyal said.

He added that this will be accomplished by working on specialized academic standards that will represent the learning outcomes for each field in cooperation with the relevant agencies.

This will motivate universities to develop their study plans periodically along with output evaluation processes, Al-Khayyal said.

Consultative meetings were also held on the sidelines of the conference with a number of international and regional accreditation bodies, including the International Organisation for Accreditaion of Institutions and Compitencies (IOAIC), to discuss cooperation between quality experts and ETEC teams.