Europe, like most other regions of the world, has the legitimate ambition to strengthen its higher education institutions, which are seen as central to the development of the knowledge society. This aspiration has a wide range of implications, particularly for quality assurance. Indeed, there have been a range of initiatives that seek to strengthen accountability in higher education. These include the emergence of quality labels and ranking schemes, as well as a focus on learning outcomes linked to the development of qualifications frameworks.

The 3^rd European Quality Assurance Forum will explore European and international trends in quality assurance. It will examine the implications of these developments for quality assurance in European higher education and internationally and ask, specifically, if these developments increase quality levels in higher education.

Following the success of the first two European Quality Assurance fora (respectively, at the Technical University of Munich and Sapienza Universita di Roma), the third forum, co-organised by ENQA, ESU, EUA and EURASHE and supported by the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Commission, is hosted by Corvinus University (Budapest, Hungary) on 20 – 22 November 2008.

The specific objectives of this third forum are:

• To gain an understanding of how higher education institutions and QA agencies are responding to new forms of accountability
• To analyse whether these new forms of accountability have the desired impact on quality levels and to examine their unintended consequences