Getting Higher Education to take Quality Improvement Seriously

1
Getting Higher Education to take Quality
Improvement Seriously

• Stephen D. Spangehl
• Director, Academic Quality Improvement Program
  (AQIP)
• The Higher Learning Commission of the North
  Central Association of Colleges and Schools (NCA)
• Chicago, Illinois

2
What challenges does higher education face?
3
Why quality ought to fit higher education

• Universities and colleges are filled with smart
  people.
• Data collection, analysis, experimentation, and
  testing are processes natural to academicians.
• Deming, Shewhart, and many other quality gurus
  came from or worked in academe.
• Accreditation, academia's traditional quality
  assurance-improvement process, inspired the
  Malcolm Baldrige National Quality program.

4
Why higher education needs quality

• Once a luxury, higher education beyond high
  school has now become a necessity.
• Competition for students among higher education
  providers has become intense.
• Survival closings, mergers, takeovers.
• Recognizable credentials are essential (Bologna
  process).
• Technology and distance delivery have changed
  access and convenience considerations.

5
Why higher education finds quality difficult

• With its roots in the medieval church, higher
  education resists seeing itself as a business.
• Accounting and fiscal management are still major
  challenges.
• Higher Education is often unclear about who it is
  serving.
• Higher education is sometimes uncertain of what
  its primary product is.

6
Who are the customers?

• The business connotations of the word customer
  offends educators, so we substitute stakeholder.
• Colleges are not clear about who they serve, whom
  they should view as stakeholders, and how to
  choose among or balance competing or conflicting
  stakeholder needs.
• Processes for understanding stakeholder needs are
  often primitive. We know whats good for them
  is a common approach.

7
"Customer" Confusion

• Confusion among needs, wants, requirements, etc.
  Give them what they want is not a mantra
  popular among educators.
• The problem is most acute among universities,
  where each component college has its own set of
  stakeholders.
• Community colleges and many special purpose
  institutions (health, law, etc.) have a very
  clear sense of stakeholders and their vocational
  needs.

8
Whats the product?

• education
• an "experience"
• growing up
• friends and marriage
• learning
• degrees
• credits
• creation of knowledge

9
800 Years of Tradition
10

• Collegial, deliberative "shared" governance and
  decision-making traditions
• Latin terminology college, colleague,
  collegial, dean, provost, chancellor, registrar,
  bursar, tenure, etc.
• Innovation, authority, tradition, scholarship vs.
  innovation and invention
• Theoretical vs. applied/practical/pragmatic focus
•  Book production technologies and the process of
  teaching the text, lecture, notes, etc.

11
(No Transcript)
12
(No Transcript)
13
Static Cling from Zachary Shore's Blunder Why
Smart People Make Bad Decisions (New York
Bloomsbury, 2008)

• Changing strong, deeply held paradigms is
  difficult, maybe impossible without a crisis
• "Stick with what works. Don't change horses in
  midstream."
• "Past performance is no guarantee of future
  performance"

14
The "Big Box" Higher Education Institutions
15
A Dynamic Landscape

• Newer proprietary universities unashamedly see
  themselves as businesses.
• They have shed many traditional constraints
  (shared governance, tenure, faculty loads, etc.)
  to minimize expense and maximize ROI.
• To traditional academics, they act recklessly,
  are opportunistic (or entrepreneurial), and
  heartlessly driven by the "bottom line."

16
Processes Results Improvement
17
2 Fundamental Quality Questions

• Are we doing the right things?
• Are we doing things right?

18
(No Transcript)
19
http//www.AQIP.org
Stephen D. Spangehl [phone] ext.
106 sds_at_hlcommission.org