Quality in higher education: from monitoring to management

Concepts of accountable management in the public sector have ensured that issues relating to performance measurement have been high on the agenda of higher education institutions. Several quality initiatives are happening at the same time as universities are faced with diminishing financial support from public sources of finance. It has been suggested that higher education should look to private sector models of performance measurement in order to address important quality issues. In taking such models, the paper argues the importance of recognising that key performance indicators on their own can be dysfunctional unless they are grounded within the culture of a strategy-focussed organisation. The paper then proposes the use of a balanced scorecard approach in order to reinforce the importance of managing rather than just monitoring performance. A balanced scorecard for a faculty of business and management is developed in order to illustrate the points being made.