Accountability for Quality in Higher Education

The pre-college education system in the United States seems to be ineffective in the areas of mathematics, sciences, and verbal ability. According to comparative tests applied in different nations, American students generally qualify below several other countries. This trend is also noticed at the college level, considering the number of remedial classes being offered in any given semester. In order to improve the quality of learning among college graduates, local, state, and national assessment and accreditation efforts have been implemented. Many of these efforts derive from quality improvement models in manufacturing. However, it seems that such efforts in higher education are not producing quality in proportion to proponents’ claims or to their cost. Similar efforts have been applied in health care with equally disappointing results. This study focuses on how much administrators may be relying on easily captured but flawed data for “knowledge” of what is actually happening in higher education.