Education for democracy: the promotion of societal-democratic values, knowledge and participation in higher education quality assurance

If over the last two decades, the development of teaching and learning in higher education institutions has focused on employability and academic qualifications, the importance of a third function of higher education is being increasingly emphasised at European level: the promotion of societal-democratic engagement. In a qualitative analysis, we examine the importance that higher education institutions in Germany attach to the development of societal-democratic engagement in the context of their quality assurance processes. The results show that societal-democratic engagement as a dimension of quality is rather weakly embedded at both universities and universities of applied sciences. Considering the contemporary challenges to democracy worldwide, the results indicate that further attention to the development of societal democratic engagement within the context of quality assurance processes is certainly merited.