Opportunities and Challenges in the Assurance and Improvement of Service Quality in Higher Education

The twenty-first century, human resources stand at the basis of the society’s economic and social development. After all, man is in control of all the other production factors, finding new means of exploiting the primary resources and continuously improving the technical capital. Indeed, man leads development. With one condition: to have the knowledge, abilities and experience to use the rest of the resources as efficient and effective as possible. Thus, man also needs to learn, to improve, to experiment. And what place would be more adequate to do all these and many more than universities, as institutions of science and knowledge? In a society in which individual personal and professional performance is seen as being determined by the provision of high quality education services, quality assurance and improvement initiatives are not only necessary, but rather mandatory for maintaining the competitiveness of public and private universities alike. The current paper aims to present and analyze the main opportunities and challenges of service quality assurance in the Romanian higher education, providing a specific focus on the tourism higher education – a domain which has undergone significant change during the last decades and which currently strives to comply with the standards and requirements set by both foreign institutions of tourism higher education as well as by professionals and other stakeholders in the hospitality and travel industries.