Price And Quality In Higher Education

The concept of quality in higher education is by no means a new one. By one set of definitions or another, colleges and universities throughout the world have always held the pursuit of excellence as their primary goal. Why then has the quality approach, developed and popularized in industry, and how increasingly applied in health care and government, receiving so much attention in higher education at this moment? What does this perspective add to the approaches to excellence with which they have long embraced?These are the two primary questions that this book seeks to address. Chapters and contributors include: "The New Productivity" by Peter F. Drucker; "World War n and the Quality Movement" by J. M. Juran; "The Quality Approach to Higher Education: Context of Concepts for Change" by Brent Ruben; "The Big Questions in Higher Education Today" by L. Edwin Coate; "An American Approach to Quality" by Marilyn R. Zuckerman and Lewis J. Hatala; "Quality hi Higher Education: Critical Issues in Definition and Assessment" by Brent Ruben; and "Ten Areas for Future Research in Total Quality Management" by A. Blanton Godfrey. The volume is graced with an opening essay by Francis L. Lawrence, president of Rutgers University.Higher education is in the public spotlight today due to the many challenges it now faces: rising tuition costs; frustration about a tight job market for graduates; calls for increased faculty productivity; concerns about political correctness; and criticisms regarding the use of grant and research funds, among others. Quality in Higher Education is a particularly timely book that will greatly benefit educators, university administrators, students, and sociologists, and all those who are interested in higher education today.

Universities tend to be judged by the test scores of their incoming students and not on what students actually learn once they attend these institutions. While shared tests and surveys have been developed, most schools refuse to publish the results. Instead, they allow such publications as U.S. News & World Report to define educational quality. In order to raise their status in these rankings, institutions pour money into new facilities and extracurricular activities while underfunding their educational programs. In Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free, Robert Samuels argues that many institutions of higher education squander funds and mislead the public about such things as average class size, faculty-to-student ratios, number of faculty with PhDs, and other indicators of educational quality. Parents and students seem to have little knowledge of how colleges and universities have been restructured over the past thirty years. Samuels shows how research universities have begun to function as giant investment banks or hedge funds that spend money on athletics and administration while increasing tuition costs and actually lowering the quality of undergraduate education. In order to fight higher costs and lower quality, Samuels suggests, universities must reallocate these misused funds and concentrate on their core mission of instruction and related research. Throughout the book, Samuels argues that the future of our economy and democracy rests on our ability to train students to be thoughtful participants in the production and analysis of knowledge. If leading universities serve only to grant credentials and prestige, our society will suffer irrevocable harm. Presenting the problem of how universities make and spend money, Samuels provides solutions to make these important institutions less expensive and more vital. By using current resources in a more effective manner, we could even, he contends, make all public higher education free.

This book examines the power relationships that organize and facilitate quality assurance in higher education. It investigates power in terms of macro systems of accountability, surveillance and regulation, and uncovers the ways in which quality is experienced by academics and managers in higher education. Louise Morley reveals some of the hidden transcripts behind quality assurance and poses significant questions: * What signs of quality in higher education are being performed and valued? * What losses, gains, fears and anxieties are activated by the procedures? * Is the culture of excellence resulting in mediocrity? Quality and Power in Higher Education covers a wide range of issues including: the policy contexts, new managerialism, the costs of quality assurance, collegiality, peer review, gender and equity implications, occupational stress, commodification and consumer values in higher education, performance, league tables, benchmarking, increasing workloads and the long-term effects on the academy. It draws upon Morley's empirical work in the UK on international studies and on literature from sociology, higher education studies, organization studies and feminist theory. It is important reading for students and scholars of higher education policy and practice, and for university managers and policy-makers.

An ambitious, comprehensive reimagining of 21st century higher education Improving Quality in American Higher Education outlines the fundamental concepts and competencies society demands from today's college graduates, and provides a vision of the future for students, faculty, and administrators. Based on a national, multidisciplinary effort to define and measure learning outcomes—the Measuring College Learning project—this book identifies 'essential concepts and competencies' for six disciplines. These essential concepts and competencies represent efforts towards articulating a consensus among faculty in biology, business, communication, economics, history, and sociology—disciplines that account for nearly 40 percent of undergraduate majors in the United States. Contributions from thought leaders in higher education, including Ira Katznelson, George Kuh, and Carol Geary Schneider, offer expert perspectives and persuasive arguments for the need for greater clarity, intentionality, and quality in U.S. higher education. College faculty are our best resource for improving the quality of undergraduate education. This book offers a path forward based on faculty perspectives nationwide: Clarify program structure and aims Articulate high-quality learning goals Rigorously measure student progress Prioritize higher order competencies and disciplinarily grounded conceptual understandings A culmination of over two years of efforts by faculty and association leaders from six disciplines, this book distills the national conversation into a delineated set of fundamental ideas and practices, and advocates for the development and use of rigorous assessment tools that are valued by faculty, students, and society. Improving Quality in American Higher Education brings faculty voices to the fore of the conversation and offers an insightful look at the state of higher education, and a realistic strategy for better serving our students.

College cost per student has been on the rise at a pace that matches - or exceeds - healthcare costs. Unlike healthcare, though, teaching quality has declined, and rapidly rising costs and declining quality are not trends easily forgiven by society. The College Cost Disease addresses these problems, providing a behavioral framework for the chronic cost/quality consequences with which higher education is fraught. Providing many compelling insights into the issues plaguing higher education, Robert Martin expounds upon H. R. Bowen's revenue theory of cost by detailing experience good theory, the principal/agent problem, and non-profit status. Reputation competition dominates higher education. Students and their parents, and public opinion in general, associate higher tuition with higher quality and greater accolades; price is used as a proxy for quality only when consumers are uncertain about quality prior to purchase. Higher education services are the most complex types of ?experience goods'; a service whose quality can only be determined after a purchase has been made. Applying formal economic theory to higher education, Robert Martin examines how and why attempts to control costs are controversial and the damaging effects these controversies have on institutions' reputations. Arguing that the college access problem cannot be solved until colleges and universities find a way to control their costs, this book brings to the fore the leading ideas that will bring about much-needed budgetary reform in higher education.

The quality of higher education is a hot topic, especially as students around the world are asked to pay more towards their own education, and expect to get what they pay for. In addition, league tables, both national and international, have come to dominate discussion, with several governments, and many institutions, setting themselves the goal of improving their ratings. In this volume Professor Turner examines the assumptions that are being made about what counts as quality, and what the traditional purposes of universities are. But with the growth of mass higher education, and the rise of student centred approaches to learning and teaching, it has become increasingly clear that high quality education is education that meets the needs of the student at that particular moment, and promotes their future development. After examining a range of different approaches to the quality of higher education and its measurement, Professor Turner develops an approach to benchmarking and quality enhancement that is better suited to the ethos of individualised learning, and uses it to critique the philosophies that have dominated debates about quality to date. This book will be of interest to scholars of higher education, but also has something important to add to debates that engage policy makers in higher education. It provides a background to the historical development of universities which might help postgraduate students ad new members of faculty understand the process in which they are engaged.