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Essay on Performance Indicators of Accountability in Higher Education
The 1980s was distinguished by the growth of the movement toward assessment and accountability. While higher education in the United States was affected by several phenomena during this decade, surely none created more fundamental change than the movement toward assessment. A 1990 study by the Education Commission of the States, for example, revealed that 40 states actively promoted assessment. Along with this movement was a rising interest in the quality of undergraduate education, and a litany of studies published in the 1980s lamented the poor condition of undergraduate education, pointing to inadequacies that needed to be corrected. By 1986, all 50 states and the District of Columbia had developed initiatives to improve undergraduate education.
Accompanying this movement was a subtle shift from growth in funding, principally through formula funding, toward funding "outcomes," "results," and "performance." This focus on performance, using funding incentives as motivators, helped encourage policy makers and the academic community to explore the use of a system of indicators to raise warning signs about the efficiency and effectiveness of higher education.
These domestic efforts paralleled developments in higher education in a number of countries, particularly in Europe and Australia. Since the late 1970s, the concepts of performance indicators and quality assessment have clearly become international issues. Indeed, they are becoming an integral part of an emerging international method on how to manage higher education, with indicators serving as signals or guides for making national or international comparisons in educational quality, effectiveness, and efficiency. Further, the main advantage of such performance indicator systems is their usefulness as points of reference for comparing quality or performance against peers over time, or achievement against a desired objective.
The 1990s emerged as part of another era awaiting further definition. First, the development of performance indicators in the 1990s differs from that in the 1980s..........
