Evaluation of quality in higher education: Content validity.

The new conception of higher education in Spanish society and in its nation al, regional and local governments has generated laws that give more indepe ndence to universities. Because of this situation, governments need informa tion about how universities use that independence. This context has stresse d the need of defining the construct of quality in higher education and the difficulty that implementing an appropriate evaluation procedure entails. This paper has two aims: first, to justify that systems of indicators are a plausible alternative to both problems, and second, to study the content v alidity of a group of indicators chosen from the literature. We have carrie d out the following process in the empirical study: we selected some indica tors related to higher education (about teaching, research, and services); we consulted experts about the congruence of these indicators, and finally we used the Osterlind's index (1989) to operationalize the consensus betwee n experts about their judgments. We describe the quality indicators obtaine d in this analysis as a possible alternative to study quality in higher edu cation.