Diversity and Quality Assurance in European Higher Education

European higher education area is a wonderful product of different languages, cultures, and institution types, these are the reasons for the huge diversity that governs. Arising common European market demands the comparability of various systems, and transparent quality assurance system is one of the guarantees for required confidence. Slovenia is already in the process of establishing the quality assurance system in higher education: forming of an independent Agency for Evaluation of higher education, formulating the needed acts that should allow the system to work. We were involved in the process of writing the criteria for evaluation of quality in higher education, defining the transition period and the tasks to be done: to test the criteria, the external evaluation trials, to evaluate the quality of higher education institutions and programmes. Of course all this has to happen without suffocate the diversity, the absolute salt and pepper of needed creativity and innovation.