Although educational criticism in our country centers mostly on elementary and secondary schools, complaints recur regularly about higher education. External critics quarrel periodically with the quality and quantity of faculty teaching and student learning, the preoccupation with graduate studies and research, the neglect of undergraduate education, the failure to constrain costs and student tuition, and the reluctance to reform and restructure like business and industry. Most of all, outside critics contend that too many baccalaureate graduates lack the knowledge and skills required for successful careers and meaningful lives in an era driven by information and innovation. 

Reformers and Reforms

Reform should come easy to academe. After all, we academics devised or developed many of the organizational and management theories that revolutionized business and industries in the United States and around the world. We contributed the concepts for reinventing government and reengineering business and developed the designs for Total Quality Management and Continuous Quality Improvement. Outsiders might well believe that academics never met an organization they could not make better. What they do not appreciate is that academe is subject to Burke's Laws. One of those laws states that the interest of academics in reform is in direct proportion to its distance from our campuses and our departments. We are much better at reforming outside organizations than our own operations. Higher education is probably the only enterprise in the world that studies more the procedures and products of outside institutions than its own processes and outputs. As a result, most academics view all of the organizational reforms of the 1980s and 1990s as all right for business and maybe for government, but anathema for academe.

The Quality Conundrum

Outsiders could have predicted that the criticism of higher education on efficiency would arouse opposition on campus, but few could have guessed that the complaints about quality would prove a greater obstacle to reform. After all, colleges had declared "Quality Job One" centuries before Ford. Unfortunately, the academic community never determined or defined with any precision the objectives of undergraduate education nor developed systematic methods for assessing campus performance. 
By default and preference, our perception of institutional quality still depends largely on inputs, such as the quantity of campus resources, the quality of admitted students, and the reputation of faculty research. This narrow notion of excellence ignores institutional results such as the quantity and quality of graduates and the range and benefits of services to students and society. This "Resource and Reputation" model of academic quality reflects the provider desires of professors and administrators rather than customer demands of students and society. The move of health care to managed care seems to leave higher education as perhaps the last refuge of a provider-driven enterprise.