Challenges and Prospects of Implementing ISO 9001:2015 in Lebanese Higher Education Institutions

Abstract

Over the past three decades, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has been promoting and advocating the standardization of quality management systems and their requirements for almost all of the technology and business fields. Recently, ISO has been expanding its activities into other topics related to social and environmental policy. ISO 9001 is one of the most well-known and widely implemented international standards of quality. Since its first inception in 1987, ISO 9001 has been modified four times in order to cover a wider variety of sectors. Through its evolution till 2015, ISO 9001 has been considered as a standard that may be suitable to meet higher educational organizations needs and requirements. Consequently, a significant number of higher education institutions induced the confidence of their stakeholders by implementing ISO 9001 into their systems. However, the contribution of the Lebanese educational institutions is still limited and exclusive to a small number of universities. The aim of this paper is to investigate the challenges of implementing ISO 9001:2015 into the Lebanese higher education institutions, shed the light on the importance of having its compliance to the quality management system requirements, and propose a solution to address these challenges.

Keywords: ISO 9001:2015, higher education institutions, quality management systems, standards.