ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Higher Education
Beyond Quality Labels: Do International Accreditation–Driven Reforms Improve Internship Performance? Evidence from China
Provisionally accepted
- 1Guangzhou City University of Technology, Guangzhou, China
- 2Guangdong University of Finance, Guangzhou, China
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In higher education, accreditation is increasingly viewed not only as a quality assurance mechanism but also as a driver of program-level educational reform. This study investigates whether international accreditation–driven reforms are associated with improvements in students' internship performance, measured through supervisor-rated evaluations within a specific placement context. Employing the entropy method and a difference-in-differences (DID) method, the analysis draws on 2,594 internship evaluations from a university in Guangzhou, China, during 2017–2023. The findings reveal that accreditation-driven reforms are associated with higher internship performance within structured placement contexts. Heterogeneity analysis shows that statistically significant associations are observed in finance, trade, manufacturing, and technology sectors, whereas no significant associations are detected in education and healthcare placements. In addition, the estimated coefficients are comparatively larger for female students than for male students, suggesting variation in internship performance across gender groups within the evaluated context. By treating international accreditation as a program-level institutional reform within a quasi-experimental setting, this study provides new empirical evidence from the Chinese context and offers policy-relevant insights for higher education institutions, accrediting bodies, and policymakers.
Keywords: DID method, Higher education reform, international accreditation, Internship performance, Learning environment
Received: 03 Nov 2025; Accepted: 16 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 XU, Duan, Tan and Chen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ying Tan
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