With the cost of tuition steadily increasing year to year, universities are looking for ways to differentiate themselves from competitors (except Harvard). In a world where adding value is a critical success factor, schools are adapting performance measures that do just that: numerically show how the institution “adds value” to students. This movement started in 2006 when the Secretary of Education under the Bush administration chastised schools for “relying on their reputations…and not measuring whether their students are actually learning”. Since then, schools have made drastic changes to increase their academic efficiency.
For example, one school utilizes a metric that analyzes a professor’s salary on a per student basis. The results were astonishing—some untenured professors made less than $100 per student while other professors who only taught a few small classes made upward of $20,000 per student. Metrics like this one illustrate the operating inefficiencies of academia.
While critics say that the increase in productivity will be at the expense of what makes a university truly unique, I do believe that universities should be run more efficiently than they currently are. With public colleges being faced with budget cuts, operating effectiveness will be the key to survival. A student deserves to know what kind of value a university will provide—I would hope it is included in tuition.
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