Measures of Accountability in Higher Education

Establishing universal measures in education is no small task. Middle managers in institutions may lack training and skills to embark on this journey. Further lacking may be the ability to recognize and act on their professional shortcomings. Transitioning from a low or no measurement culture to an organizational culture with performance indicators and measurements for success require a collaborative approach and 100% engagement from the community in order to ensure broad adoption. This type of transformation requires leadership adopt an authentic, open and collaborative approach with staff provided with direction, that are empowered to act to achieve the goals of transformation.

The Brand Identity Test

When we begin the marketing part of our Operations Assessment one of our first questions is “What is your value proposition” this question sometimes illicits more blank faces than answers.  If you think your institution has a value proposition, try the following test.  If you ask this same question in your next staff meeting, you will find as many unique and different answers as there are people in the room.  To make sure you get the best answers ask your team to write their answers down and collect them when completed.

When beginning a branding development process you should prepare for resistance.  Resistance will likely occur where the cross roads meet between “What Your Audience Values” and “Your Strengths” as these two items are sometimes different.  Your staff will also have different opinions about the strenghts offered by your institution and your students may value a similar but different range of items.  The mere suggestion of a branding development process will make some employees uncomfortable as even the most mild potential for change can be threatening to some.

What Your Audience Values

This gets to the heart of education itself.  Why do students enroll at your institution, and what do they hope to get out of the experience?  An institution that begins with these questions and makes a concerted effort to get to the real answers will be on their way to identifying their brand and value proposition.  The shared governance structure in non-profit education should be very successful at managing the process to get these answers but they are not always successful in doing so.  Likewise, the situational leadership and “top-down” management style in corporately owned for-profit institutions typically have a keen awareness of their brand identity; one weakness is they may not factor in the opinions of students well enough.

Your Strengths

Getting faculty, administration and staff members together to identify departmental then institutional strengths can be an insightful and fun time for all involved.  Finding where the key stakeholders’ identified strengths meet what the audience thinks is important is where an institution will find its brand promise and resulting value proposition.

Problems

• If students do not value the institutions' strengths, then perhaps the institutions needs to focus on developing additional strengths

• Students may not identify an institutional strength; this may be an indicator of success, but this does not mean we stop this process as brand management is a continual effort

Shared Governance – sometimes the appearance of shared governance is just that, an appearance.  While too much ‘shared governance’ leads to a failure to make decisions, a balance is required.  In terms of Situational Leadership and the “top-down” approach to management in for-profit institutions, a leader may spend too much time telling and directing and not enough time listening.  Again, balance is required for successfully managing your Brand Identity – perhaps the most critical element of your public image.

Finally, we believe if conducted more frequently than a strategic planning process, a continuous analysis of what students want, what an institution is delivering on and how each aligns with the institutional mission can be a very healthy undertaking for an education provider.

A Word About Assessment & SAT Scores

Do students achieve the stated learning objectives? What is the percentage of faculty with terminal degrees? What is the acceptance rate? What College Board http://www.collegeboard.com/ tier groups comprise your new class? We see program assessment, classroom assessment and the noted "general" assessment categories. Each provides a set standard of practices and a schedule for reporting results. When navigating the minefield of assessment with an eye that is focused on what's important, how do we determine what counts?

The answer may be an easy, 'it depends on your perspective' but if we had to select one assessment of the higher education experience, what would (or should) it be?

Those of us who work in higher education are aware of the challenges of pleasing multiple constituencies: administrators, trustees, directors, regulators, accreditation commissions, faculty governance, unions and not to mention students and their parents. We debate assessment regularly. This article discussed the issue of making SAT scores optional during the admissions process http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/26/sat. In this case we are assessing the validity and impact on making SAT scores optional as an admissions requirement. This is an important issue to discuss and the early results of this study appear to reveal what we could have guessed: dropping the SAT as an admissions requirement increases diversity and average GPA's of the incoming class and in public institutions results in higher academic achievement. Great! All public institutions should drop the SAT as a requirement. Since public institutions are usually more affordable and dropping this requirement increases diversity and diverse populations tend to have a greater financial need, from an enrollment marketing perspective, this is a win-win-win situation.