Standards as Data: Sustaining Curriculum Governance Under Changing National Academic Standards in Higher Education

Sustainability in higher education is usually studied through what institutions teach or how their campuses operate. Less attention has been paid to the sustainability of the governance arrangements through which institutions meet the requirements set for them by national bodies, although those requirements are how national development priorities reach institutions, and effective, accountable, and transparent institutions are a concern of SDG 16. When such arrangements do not last, each new requirement is met by reconstructing the work from documents and recollection; when they do, committees meet it from a known and verified state. This study defines a governance arrangement as sustainable when it functions across personnel change, absorbs revisions of the requirements it serves without starting over, and lowers rather than reproduces its own coordination cost, and examines that definition against the arrangement through which a Saudi college of business keeps its academic programs aligned with national academic standards. Over eleven months the college built a platform holding the standards as structured data linked to ten interdependent study plans, evaluated against production records and the regulator’s nine standards documents. A revision of the standards during deployment was absorbed within a single cycle, the encoded model was verified unit for unit against the source documents, and holding standards as data exposed a shared three-credit course that meets a requirement in one program and falls short of the same requirement in another, because minimums are percentages of program-specific credit bases. Against the definition, the arrangement retained its state between cycles, held its working record in the system, and absorbed the revision. However, the reduction in coordination cost is a proposition supported by participant observation rather than a measured outcome, no complete governance cycle has yet been observed under different personnel, and maintenance still depends on the person who built it. This study contributes a definition of governance sustainability with four components assessed by level of evidence, five design principles stated with their evidential standing, and implications for how national bodies publish requirements.