Assurance of learning in higher education: structural necessity, interpretive politics and constructed misalignment

Abstract Assurance of learning (AoL) in higher education is frequently criticised as a neoliberal technology of audit that erodes academic autonomy and narrows educational purpose. Although such critiques identify real implementation problems, they often conflate the existence of assurance with the particular managerial forms through which it is enacted. This paper argues that this collapse weakens analysis of contemporary higher education and produces what is termed constructed misalignment: the tendency to read structurally generated assurance requirements as evidence of ideological intent. Using critical realism as the primary theoretical framework and retroduction as the mode of analysis, the paper examines the Australian case through political, economic, social, and legal-regulatory conditions. The argument is that assurance has become structurally necessary because mass higher education must coordinate public legitimacy, student investment, widening participation, curriculum coherence, and regulatory accountability at scale. University governance under neoliberal policy contexts has strongly shaped how AoL is often translated, through metrics, compliance, and managerial communication, but it does not sufficiently explain why assurance as a construct persists across tertiary education systems. Reframing AoL in this way enables a more productive distinction between necessary coordination and poor enactment. This paper therefore contributes to higher education scholarship in three ways: it distinguishes structural necessity from ideological translation in debates about AoL; it develops constructed misalignment as a concept for explaining academic resistance; and it repositions constructive alignment as a pedagogically grounded means of exercising professional judgement within, rather than outside, assurance arrangements.