This paper aims to conceptualise quality maturity as the extent to which educational programmes demonstrate stable, evidence-based and progressively integrated capacity to satisfy accreditation expectations. Focusing on Malaysian civil engineering programmes, it examines how longitudinal accreditation findings can be used as evaluative evidence of uneven programme maturity across public and private provision.
The study uses a longitudinal document analysis of Accreditation Decision Meeting reports from 2000 to 2024, covering 187 accreditation visits across 39 civil engineering programmes at 33 Malaysian higher education institutions. Findings were extracted at criterion and subcriterion levels, coded into five accreditation outcome categories and harmonised across five Engineering Accreditation Council standards periods.
The findings show that accreditation maturity is uneven across criteria and institution types. Delivery-facing domains, particularly curriculum, student development, staffing and facilities, generated most recorded strengths. Governance-facing domains, including outcome assessment, stakeholder engagement, staffing continuity, quality management and continuous quality improvement, remained more persistent sources of concern. Public–private differences are therefore interpreted as differences in institutional capacity, historical depth and organisational stability rather than as a simple hierarchy of provider quality.
The study demonstrates how accreditation findings can diagnostically distinguish levels of quality maturity, supporting more proportionate enhancement strategies at programme, institutional and accreditation-system levels.
By moving beyond a compliance-based reading of accreditation, this study develops an accreditation-based quality maturity framework and provides rare longitudinal evidence from a Washington Accord-aligned developing country context.
