Information to promote assessment of organizational effectiveness in colleges and universities is presented, along with an exercise to rank the effectiveness of 10 institutions. The exercise uses three types of criteria to indicate effectiveness: subjective ratings, data about students and activities, and institutional capacity and financial…

The productivity of 40 major research universities in combining faculty and governmental grants to obtain reputational rankings in the 1980s is examined empirically. These productivities are measured relative to the most efficient members of the group and for their proximities to minimal costs. (Author/MLW)

Opinions about quality are seen as the only relevant measures of quality that can be collected. A different view of quality in higher education, and a different set of university rankings are proposed. A system that draws pairwise comparisons of university performance across nine disciplines is described. (MLW)

Rankings of colleges and universities in the popular press have two problems: (1) they are gimmicks to sell publications; and (2) institutions have become pawns, juggling numbers in quest of higher rankings, the ethical equivalent of cheating. Higher education must return to truth, fairness, and honesty to regain its purpose and integrity. (MSE)

The "Flexner Report" of 1910, which described 155 U.S. and Canadian medical schools, is discussed, along with its influence on later studies of academic quality. Scholars almost universally agree that the Flexner Report dramatically changed the nature of medical education in the United States, although they disagree about how this…

Five school administrators and art educators respond to the question: "What is your view of the general condition of the arts in the schools today compared to five years ago? Consider changes in both quality and quantity, status and content." (Editor/SJL)

Can all the universities that claim to be "world-class" actually live up to the claim? If they could, would that be desirable public policy? It could be that there are so many different meanings of "world-class" that the term in practical effect is an oxymoron: the definition of "world" is determined locally when conceptually it should be defined…

This paper summarizes a May 1972, study of the relationship between teaching and research in seventeen University of Washington departments. The study sought correlations among the following: (1) Research reputation, measured by departments' ratings in the most recent American Council on Education's rating of Graduate Programs. (2) Departmental…

The factors that played a major role in the rapid improvement of academic departments at eight major research universities are explored. Five improvement strategies are identified: departmental hiring practices, funding, leadership, strategic planning, and overall institutional reputation. (Author/MLW)

Evidence is presented both for and against the proposition that innovation is punished by surveys that rank academic quality. Systematic work is needed to show how innovation, experimentation, and lack of orthodoxy in research and teaching affect Ph.D. programs' ratings in academic quality rankings. (Author/MLW)

The characteristics of medical schools that predict their ratings are associated with basic science and clinical research performance: faculty productivity, eminence of the leading members of the faculty, and resources available for research. (Author/AM)

Quality rankings of undergraduate institutions and programs do exist although they are hard to find and often ignored. The accuracy of these ratings and how they can be improved are discussed. (MLW)

The five-volume Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States, the most authoritative academic quality ranking ever done, is discussed. The Assessment covers 2,699 programs in 32 disciplines and assesses a faculty's reputation for scholarly quality. Improvements in programs' reputations are also discussed. (MLW)

Five approaches to measuring higher education quality are outlined and criticized as incomplete: the nihilist, reputational, resources, outcome, and value-added approaches. Feedback from students and faculty is the key to discovering and improving institutional contributions to student development. (MSE)

To assure program quality, an institution should choose its priorities--minimum achievements required, learning gains sought, content of learning emphasized, degree of rigor expected--and adopt a strategy for effective coordination of the efforts of the many persons who can contribute to each individual's learning. (Author/MLW)