Introduction Improving the quality of education around the world has become an important activity as many institutions of higher education (colleges and universities) struggle to create better educational opportunities for their current and prospective students. According to various stakeholders in the education sector, quality management has become one of the fundamental components of higher education in the 21 st century. The access to education is no longer an important fundamental component of education as quality education continues to gain centre stage in many educational institutions. Basic education is now deemed insufficient or incomplete if it is not accompanied by quality management in teaching and learning strategies. Quality education has gained a lot of importance as it is used in the development of excellence, knowledge and expertise which are vital aspects in the growth of an economy (Ali & Shastri, 2009). Many educational institutions around the world have developed strategies that will be used in the establishment of higher education to ensure that there is quality in education provision. This has mostly been possible as a result of the increasing importance and value placed on leadership and leadership skills within organizations. Gaining good leaders to be established in the world is only possible when there are developed systems of higher education that will ensure efficiency and effectiveness remain as the sole criteria of evaluating performance (Ali & Shastri, 2009). The purpose of this study will be to determine what institutions of higher learning have to do so as to achieve quality in their educational objectives, missions, visions, goals and strategies. The study will first discuss the aspect of quality and quality management in a general sense and then focus on how quality management is applied in educational institutions. Quality Management Quality management is part of the management strategies that are aimed at achieving quality goals within organizations through the execution of organizational activities such as planning, monitoring, control and quality assurance to ensure quality has been achieved in the business processes and operations of an organization. Quality management is based on principles such as customer focus, cost leadership, product/service development and the continual improvement of a company’s operations so as to achieve a competitive edge in the market. The most commonly used quality management technique in organizations is the total quality management (TQM) approach which aims at improving the total quality of business operations within an organization (Cua et al, 2001). Other approaches that are used in quality management include ISO performance improvement standards (ISO certification), quality management systems, quality function deployment and the six-sigma quality management technique. The main objectives of all these quality management approaches are to organize the efforts of employees within organizations so that their work performance produces outputs that are of a high quality and standard (Anand et al, 2010). The main component of quality management is quality which is defined as the degree to which a certain group of intrinsic prop