Global Engineering Accreditation Frameworks: A Systematized Literature Review of Their Impacts in Engineering Education Research

Research Paper Recommended citation: Pollettini Marcos, L., Higbee, R. E., Tanay, B. A., & Douglas, K. A. (2025). Global Engineering Accreditation Frameworks: A Systematized Literature Review of Their Impacts in Engineering Education Research. In Kangaslampi, R., Langie, G., Järvinen, H.-M., & Nagy, B. (Eds.), SEFI 53rd Annual Conference. European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), Tampere, Finland. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17631915. This Conference Paper is brought to you for open access by the 53rd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) at Tampere University in Tampere, Finland. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. GLOBAL ENGINEERING ACCREDITATION FRAMEWORKS: A SYSTEMATISED LITERATURE REVIEW OF THEIR IMPACTS IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION RESEARCH L Pollettini Marcos a,1, R E Higbee b, B A Tanay c, K A Douglas d a Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA, ORCID 0009-0006-2112-0521 b Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA, ORCID 0000-0002-6011-9279 c Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA, ORCID 0009-0005-0637-6548 d Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA, ORCID 0000-0002-2693-5272 Conference Key Areas: Quality assurance and accreditation of engineering educational programs; Improving higher engineering education through researching engineering education Keywords: Accreditation, Systematised Literature Review, EUR-ACE, Washington Accord ABSTRACT In recent decades, international systems for the mutual recognition of engineering degrees have been established to facilitate the mobility of engineering professionals. Some of these systems are now globally influential, notably the EUR-ACE system and the International Engineering Alliance (IEA) accords: Washington Accord, Sydney Accord, and Dublin Accord. These systems are enacted by providing frameworks for the accreditation of engineering programs, specifying general guidelines and outcomes for programs. Given the high level at which these global engineering education accreditation frameworks operate, this study set out to understand how such frameworks are represented in the engineering education literature. To accomplish our goal, we conducted a systematised literature review in which we synthesised publications that analysed the frameworks. We collected publications from four databases, totalling 359 unique results. Of those, 244 mentioned the frameworks in their abstracts only for contextualising or justifying their studies. We selected 33 publications that met all our inclusion criteria for a full-paper 1 Corresponding Author L Pollettini Marcos [email protected] synthesis. Our results show that publications that deeply discuss the frameworks are mostly concerned with historical documentation and comparisons among them. The publications that analyse the frameworks tend to examine the frameworks’ criteria through specific lenses, such as sustainability or communication. Other analytical papers promote discussions about the overlap of these frameworks in the context of transnational accreditation, and around the balancing of local, regional, and global interests within engineering programs. Our findings suggest there is space in the literature for scholars to further debate these accreditation frameworks with a more critical perspective. 1 INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE REVIEW In recent decades, the mobility of engineering professionals and the mutual recognition of engineering degrees across countries has become more important for the engineering profession. Such importance comes as a result of increasingly interconnected national economies and the advent of technologies that shorten distances in a world with a sense of scarcity of engineers. While there is a prevalent discourse in many countries that they cannot graduate enough engineers to satisfy the demand for professionals, the expansion of major companies to new regions also helps to create an environment where engineering graduates from all over the world become potential hires (Alam & Kootsookos, 2021; Dixon, 2016; Matemba & Lloyd, 2017). However, due to different education traditions and legal requirements, enabling engineers to practice their work in different countries requires recognition of equivalence of engineering degrees or professional practice. One way of addressing legal and educational differences to promote mutual recognition of engineering degrees is through shared standards of quality for the accreditation of engineering programs (Dixon, 2016; Patil & Codner, 2007). In many national systems, engineering programs are subject to accreditation procedures, which verify that the programs are meeting established quality standards and grants them some form of recognition (Schwarz & Westerheijden, 2004). For example, recognition can take the form of a quality label that governments and companies may acknowledge for additional value, or it can have legal implications such as a program’s right to confer valid degrees (Akera, 2017; Schwarz & Westerheijden, 2004). International accords and labels have emerged to provide comparability between engineering programs in different countries and facilitate mutual recognition of degrees. Accords and labels can be regional in scope—such as the ARCO-SUR system for countries in the MERCOSUR trade block—or grow to have a global reach, like the Washington Accord and the EUR-ACE system. The primary set of global engineering accreditation frameworks in effect for the purposes of mutual recognition are those operated by the International Engineering Alliance (IEA), and the EUR-ACE system. While there are some practical differences in terms of how the IEA accords and the EUR-ACE system operate, we consider them to be comparable because they both have a global sphere of influence and provide a standardised conception of quality in engineering education. The IEA currently manages three similar accords aimed at recognising the equivalency of engineering (Washington Accord—WA), engineering technician (Dublin Accord— DA), and engineering technology (Sydney Accord—SA) degrees (Hanrahan, 2009; IEA, 2014). The IEA provides a unified document with attributes and professional competencies, specifying standards used to assess substantial equivalence between accreditation systems in the signatory countries (IEA, 2021, 2023). The EUR-ACE system is managed by the European Network for Accreditation of Engineering Education (ENAEE), functioning through a “meta-accreditation” process in which ENAEE verifies that national accreditation bodies conform to the EUR-ACE Framework Standards and Guidelines (Alam & Kootsookos, 2021; Augusti et al., 2017). Through this verification, ENAEE grants the accreditation bodies the ability to award the EUR-ACE label to engineering programs they accredit. Currently, the IEA accords have over 30 full and provisional signatory countries, whereas there are over 50 countries with programs that have been awarded the EUR-ACE label (ENAEE, 2024; IEA, 2025a, 2025b, 2025c). Additionally, there are other similar systems with a global influence, such as the CDIO initiative. For the purposes of this study, we considered CDIO to not be comparable to the IEA accords and EUR-ACE because of its voluntary nature and because it does not focus on enabling mutual recognition of engineering degrees. As the WA, DA, SA, and EUR-ACE function in many ways as a form of international policy, they have the potential to influence research and practice in the engineering education space. The field of engineering education has many connections to policy and policymaking, thus researchers may see opportunities to connect their research to those higher-level discussions and contribute to the discourse (Jesiek et al., 2010). It is reasonable to assume that the IEA accords and the EUR-ACE system are impacting engineering education research by guiding overall research agendas through the competencies valued by the frameworks and by promoting discussions and contextualised analyses of the frameworks themselves. Recently, a publication in the field has called for more research on the political, social, and economic factors that shape engineering education, paving the way for more analytical work focused on global accreditation frameworks (Katz & Main, 2022). Currently, however, there are no studies in the literature that have attempted to summarise or understand how these global engineering accreditation frameworks are being addressed in published literature. The purpose of this study is to characterise the reach of the WA, SA, DA, and EUR-ACE within engineering education research to ascertain the reasons why authors turn to them, and what are the findings of those who analyse the frameworks themselves. We conducted a systematised literature review to answer the following research questions: “How does the literature address global engineering education accreditation frameworks?”, and “How do authors analyse global engineering education accreditation frameworks?” 2 METHODS To understand how the current literature utilises the WA, DA, SA, and EUR-ACE, we conducted a systematised literature review. Systematised and systematic literature reviews both seek to search the academic literature in a methodical and reproducible manner (Grant & Booth, 2009). A systematised review, however, does not include one or more elements of a systematic one (Grant & Booth, 2009). In the case of this study, our investigation does not fall under a systematic review umbrella because we did not incorporate any sort of quality assessment of the literature we were examining, as making judgments to the quality and value of the literature we were interested in does not align with our goal of providing an overview of how these frameworks are being used. Even though we did not perform any quality assessment of our data, we still used the PRISMA framework to guide the process (Page et al., 2021), following steps applicable to our context (e.g., those related to statistics of summarised results were not adopted). 2.1 Review Scope and Criteria Our first step was establishing the scope and criteria for the review. We were interested in publications that mention any of the four accreditation frameworks we outlined: WA, DA, SA, or EUR-ACE. This broad scope would allow us to capture many uses of these frameworks, which aligns with our first research question. The inclusion and exclusion criteria we decided on is represented in Table 1. It is important to note that we added an extra criterion during the screening part of the process, which we will explain in section 2.3. Table 1. Inclusion and exclusion criteria for our literature review. Criterion Description Rationale Mention of frameworks Papers were included if their titles or abstracts nominally mentioned the WA, SA, DA, or EUR-ACE system These publications would be aligned with our first RQ. Publication date Papers were included if they had been published on or after 1988. The WA is the oldest framework in this study (1989), so we allowed the inclusion of papers published up to a year before that. Publication type Papers were excluded if they were not journal or conference papers. Journal and conference papers are more likely to be peer-reviewed. Professional accords Paper was excluded if the frameworks were being discussed exclusively in relation to professional accords. While professional accords are intimately related to these accreditation frameworks, they hold implications towards engineering practice and not education. Paper language If full paper was only available in a language other than English, it was excluded. English is the only language all authors in this study understand. Analyses accreditation framework* Papers were included in the full analysis if they analysed or discussed implications to one or more of the four accreditation frameworks. Papers that analysed or discussed implications to the frameworks are more aligned with our second RQ. * Criterion added during abstract screening 2.2 Development of Search String and Database Selection We started developing our search string by incorporating different forms for the names of the WA, DA, SA, and EUR-ACE. It was also important to include the IEA and ENAEE in our search string, as they are the organizations that manage the frameworks of interest. Finally, we incorporated the names of the documents that provide the standards for EUR-ACE and the trio of IEA accords: the “EUR-ACE Framework Standards and Guidelines (EAFSG)” and “Graduate Attributes and Professional Competencies”, respectively. However, the inclusion of the EAFSG in the search string yielded no extra results, and the written-out name would already be encompassed with our existing search terms because it contains “EUR-ACE”. We searched for our final string in the following four databases: Compendex and INSPEC (both part of Engineering Village), Scopus, and Web of Science (all databases). We selected these databases to ensure we had a mix of generalpurpose and field-specific databases Our final search string was “ENAEE OR EURACE OR ‘Washington Accord’ OR ‘International Engineering Alliance’ OR ‘Graduate Attributes and Professional Competencies’ OR ‘Sydney Accord’ OR ‘Dublin Accord’”. By using this search string and limiting the results to only journal or conference publications from 1988 to 2025, we received a total of 163 results from Web of Science, 244 results from Scopus, and 338 results from Engineering Village. 2.3 Filtering and Reviewing Papers As a first step for filtering our results, we combined results from all databases and checked for duplicates by searching for identical titles. Our second step was to review the abstracts for the remaining 359 papers to check for relevance to our study. To get started on this process, three authors reviewed an initial set of 10 random abstracts in our sample to have a discussion around our decision-making for inclusion. We agreed to include papers if they mentioned one our search terms in the title or abstract in a context related to higher education. Fig. 1. PRISMA chart for our systematised literature review After performing some independent categorisation, many papers were being flagged as relevant, but the abstract indicated that the accreditation frameworks of interest were being used exclusively for contextualisation or motivation purposes in the studies. Because this would not be helpful in answering our second RQ and would add great volume to our final analysis, we introduced an additional inclusion criterion so that only papers analysing the frameworks would be included in the full-paper synthesis. Thus, we categorised the papers in a preliminary manner according to their use of any of the four accreditation frameworks in the abstract, resulting in three categories: “Unclear”, “Analysis or Implications”, and “Context”. Three authors then reviewed and categorised all 359 abstracts independently. Next, we compared our abstract categorisation decisions, and for each disagreement, we read the abstracts again and had a discussion until we reached consensus. Figure 1 shows a PRISMA chart with all steps in our literature review. For the synthesis step, we decided to fully read papers that we had pre-categorised as being an analysis of an accreditation framework, as having implications for a framework, or papers that we were not able to categorise just from the abstract. Additional papers were removed from our sample as we located the full text versions. For the review and synthesis of the remaining 33 papers, we looked for two things: first, what accreditation frameworks the paper was discussing; and second, how the accreditation framework was being used in the paper. We distributed the full papers to three authors so that each paper would only be fully read by one person. 2.4 Limitations Our study has a few limitations worth highlighting. The first is related to the paper indexing: we would expect more publications to nominally mention these frameworks in the main body of the work, but our search only looked into titles, abstracts, and keywords. The second and main limitation is the pre-categorisation we implemented with the papers in our sample. Because our final sample was too high for the scope of this review, we had to make a judgment on each publication as to how they were using the frameworks based solely on the abstract for our initial classification. Abstracts only provides a limited perspective into a publication, so it is possible that we mistakenly categorised some papers. Finally, again due to scoping concerns, we ended up not reviewing the full papers for the publications we had categorised as being related to context or background, but we believe the research community could still gain some relevant insights from a deeper analysis of papers in that category. Such an analysis could more explicitly show what aspects of these accreditation frameworks are more frequently influencing studies that do not deal with educational policy. 3 RESULTS From our categorisation of abstracts, a total of 236 papers were in the “context” category, signalling that many engineering education publications refer to these global engineering education accreditation frameworks to justify or contextualise their study. After synthesising the 33 full papers included in our analysis in terms of their use of the global engineering accreditation frameworks, we arrived at the classification depicted in Table 2. As a note, there are three papers that we classified within two of the classifications as they met the criteria for both (Kootsookos et al., 2017; Levy, 2000; Winkens et al., 2023). Table 2. Summary of how papers that were fully analysed used the global engineering accreditation frameworks. Use of frameworks Description Publications Historical documentation These are papers where the authors are documenting the history of one of the global engineering accreditation frameworks, discussing their current activities at the time of publication, and occasionally their plans for the future. These papers are frequently authored by people involved in the IEA, ENAEE, or a founding member of either. (Augusti, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2009a, 2009b, 2010a, 2010b; Borri et al., 2014; Gerasimov et al., 2016; Guberti, Betti, et al., 2015; Guberti, Borri, et al., 2015; Levy, 2000; Milligan et al., 2013; Phillips et al., 2000) Comparison These papers make some sort of comparison including at least one of the global engineering accreditation frameworks of interest for this study. Some of these comparisons are broad, whereas others are focused on specific ideas or topics within the accreditation frameworks (such as resilience in engineering designs). Finally, some papers provide comparisons in terms of how different countries implement the WA standards. (Alkhairy et al., 2009; Anwar & Richards, 2018; Costa et al., 2012; Jolly, 2017; Kootsookos et al., 2017; Malmqvist, 2012; Ressler & Lenox, 2016; Winkens et al., 2023) Implications These papers tie their major findings to one or more of the global engineering accreditation frameworks of interest, leading to some sort of recommendation or call to action to change the frameworks or move them forward in their goal of providing mobility for engineering professionals. (Akinmusuru, 2003; Anwar & Richards, 2013, 2015; Balascio, 2020; Desha et al., 2019; Duarte & Costa, 2015; Levy, 2000; Wilson & Marnewick, 2018; Wolff & Van Breda, 2023) Analysis For papers that analyse the criteria in the global accreditation frameworks from a certain perspective (e.g., their inclusion of sustainability or communication skills). One paper analysed the WA from the perspective of dual accreditation, and another put it in conversation with local and regional accreditation (Barrera, 2022; Bullen & Silverstein, 2005; Harrison & Vanbaelen, 2015; Kootsookos et al., 2017; Winkens et al., 2023) We wish to provide a bit more context around the five “Analysis” papers, as these more critically examine the global engineering accreditation frameworks in some way. Bullen and Silverstein (2005), although short in their analysis, provide a thought-provoking discussion around the careful approach that needs to be taken when engineering programs are balancing local, regional, and global accreditation requirements. They conclude that there is value in a global “core” of attributes for engineering graduates that programs can refer to in order to ensure higher employability for its graduates. Barrera (2022), Harrison and Vanbaelen (2015) and Winkens, Engelhardt, and Leicht-Scholten (2023) take a similar approach in that they all examined how these accreditation frameworks incorporated, respectively, the inclusion of sustainability as discussed in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, communication skills, and resilience in engineering designs. These three papers offer recommendations to the frameworks in terms of what they can change to better incorporate these ideas. Finally, (Kootsookos et al., 2017) examines what the dual accreditation of an offshore engineering program means by exposing how two different countries that are both signatories of the WA choose to emphasise different aspects of the guidelines to make them more locally relevant. They conclude that in the case of an offshore engineering program, this dual accreditation would lead graduates to be locally relevant engineers in multiple settings. These five papers show how the academic community has been looking to influence the frameworks and discussions about them. 4 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS Our first research question, “How does the literature address global engineering education accreditation frameworks?” can be answered at a high level through our analysis of the abstracts. What stands out about our results is the fact that an overwhelming majority of the papers that do mention a global engineering accreditation framework do so seemingly only to provide a formal contextualisation or motivation towards their study. This suggests that, to some extent, these frameworks are influencing the discourse in the literature related to engineering education, as researchers seek to make this field of research more mature by situating it in dialogue with high-level policies (Jesiek et al., 2010). Our second research question, “How do authors analyse global engineering education accreditation frameworks?” provides a more interesting discussion that can be related to the results of our abstract and full paper analysis. First, looking at the abstract-level analysis, we can see that a small portion of the publications chose to actually examine these frameworks. Our analysis highlights how, even within those publications that examine the frameworks and discuss them in-depth, many are concerned with describing and documenting these frameworks as they continue to develop, with notable contributions from people that were leading such efforts. This signals that the scientific community is not publicly engaging with the idea of authoring literature that provide suggestions or contributions to the discussions about these frameworks. In particular, there is a lack of methods that seek to investigate the political, social, and economic dimensions of these frameworks, echoing the call made by Katz and Main (2022). We believe this could be due to either these discussions taking place "behind the scenes", or perhaps a divide between the scientific community and policymakers leading these frameworks. Given the increasing global presence of these frameworks and their influence in terms of motivation and contextualisation for other studies, we recommend that more research should be conducted to critically examine and discuss these frameworks in a method that is accessible by all members of the scientific community. Phillips, W. M., Peterson, G. D., & Aberle, K. B. (2000). Quality Assurance for Engineering Education in a Changing World. International Journal of Engineering Education, 16(2), 97–103. Ressler, S., & Lenox, T. (2016). 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