Recently, the report by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education likens the education industry to railroads and steel manufacturers in its potential failure to respond to the changing world. The writers of the Commission report seem well versed in the late Theodore Levitt’s intellect. Levitt, former editor of Harvard Business Review and a respected scholar, explored in “Marketing Myopia,” the premise that the railroad industry failed to sustain its growth as a result of a myopic view of its own market. Levitt introduced the idea that businesses concentrating on customers’ needs, rather than on selling products, do better in the end. Railroads were product oriented (focused on railroads), not customer oriented (focused on transportation).
In a similar way, American higher education can meet the changing demands of the world around it by redefining its orientation. Increasingly, students care about results. The Commission recognizes a need for higher education to change from a reputation-based system (product oriented) to a performance-based system (customer oriented). Like the railroads and other industries, the education industry does not lack opportunity but needs a push toward the innovation and boldness necessary to avoid obsolescence.
The Commission recommends stimulating innovation and improvement by using institutional benchmarks (i.e. student access, retention, costs) to compare data across institutions. The re-emergence of benchmarking as a tool for measuring and managing change is a step in the right direction. Recently, the National University Telecommunications Network and Hezel Associates developed a benchmarking tool, IQAT (the Interactive Quality Assessment Tool). IQAT was designed to fulfill the growing need for systematic data comparison across multiple institutions. Continuous benchmarking, such that IQAT facilitates, helps reveal standards and best practices an institution can use to improve its performance and alignment. Higher education’s customers - the students - will benefit from more efficient systems, as will the institutions.
The Commission also recommends making comparative data more readily available to the public, including information about cost, admissions data, retention and completion rates and, possibly, learning outcomes. While individual reports are confidential in IQAT, the users aggregate data regularly, create new benchmark groups, propose survey topics and can release their own data if they want. By asking new questions and attempting to expand and improve the industry, education can become less myopic and more broadly defined, reaching far more students.