A Study On Cost Of Quality For Personnel Training In Universities And Colleges

From Elite to Mass Higher Education, the strategy of development which focuses on Chinese universities & colleges' personnel training turned from the pursuit of "Scale Effect" to " Improving the Quality " just as the implementation of the "211 Project", the " 985 Project" and the strategy of " Building A Strong Higher Education Country "; However, quality also means a price:With the deepening of "Quality Project for Higher Education", Today's higher educational institutions have faced the lingering criticism of their "Cost Disease" in high tuition fees, high debt operation, extravagancy and inefficiency, leaving an unsolved mystery of cost inputs to ensure the quality of personnel training. So what is the current state of quality cost in this regard? What is the reasonable proportion? How to be improved if necessary? Therefore, this paper will regard the probing of the above questions as a main part of the research."Cost of Quality" (COQ) was a classical concept and the discourse system in Management, Economics and Engineering; It is not only necessary but a development strategy to introduce such system into the higher education research for Chinese universities & colleges' management:On the one hand, as the third sector and a non-profit organization, colleges also required the operation based on obtaining the fundamental value such as equality and efficiency in their organization goals; The COQ of universities & colleges'personnel training can become the reality reference system for these value of their idea of quality & cost and the performance management practice. On the other hand, the quality and the cost of Chinese colleges'personnel training have a significant relevance. Through the analysis of the fitting curve, quadratic-function of cost production and Perason correlation from " 985 Project Universities " in recent years, it has shown that an "half inverted U-tupe " positive association between the quality and the cost of colleges' personnel training can be seen. It should be noted that although the universities & colleges'personnel training is a similar but more specific activation as an enterprise organizational behavior, so it is not appropriate to build its discourse by using the "Cost of Poor Quality" as the core concept. Instead, we should return to the original idea of " quality of just cost" to build the Performance Management rightly.Based on these reviews, we take the benchmarking tool and had a hierarchical comparison between Chinese and American universities in terms of the COQ,COQ per college student,COQ percents to total cost and internal structure of COQ for colleges' personnel training in accordance with " Acceptable Quality ", " Good Quality ", " Top Quality", the results told us that:With the upgrading of "Quality benchmarking", the quality of American universities, the cost of personnel training and the proportion of the total cost increased step by step; internal structure featured the declining of the proportion of " Instruction " and the increasing of the proportion of " Department research " based on the upgrading of "Quality benchmarking" and the "Human-Oriented" development strategy, which is reflected in the relationship between the quality and the COQ in American universities. However, in China's universities, "Good Quality" doesn't mean that the COQ has the higher proportion in the total cost than "Acceptable Quality". In addition, historical data also shows that funds are prioritized to "Non-human" rather than " Human " during the process of the development of high-level universities.From the perspective of fairness and efficiency, China's universities can refer to American universities which can help them identify the "reasonable range " of personnel training goals. On the one hand, the study of equality found that there was an unequal tendency reflected on the coefficient of variation, Gini index in China's universities in 1999-2007 among the 31 provinces, and the Theil index remained stable. It told us that the inequality was caused by the provinces at the end of the ranking list of COQ, who has lower COQ investigation. On the other hand, the study based on the efficiency analysis showed that more than 50% of " 985 project universities " were inefficient through DEA measurement in 1999-2007. The result measured through SFA further showed that the input-output efficiency rate of the COQ for "Ministry of Education Universities "was 0.59 and it was significantly affected by the Government location, subject type, geographic location and other factors. According to equality and efficiency ranking of the above-mentioned Chinese universities, with reference to American universities reasonably, there were three quality-goal levels for the COQ to develop its external and internal dimensions.How was the COQ converted to the quality of personnel training? This is the key and practical question Chinese universities & colleges faced in improving their COQ and structure. Based on the perspective of the "Individual Capital Transformation", the paper constructed a SEM named "The COQ converted to Quality of universities & colleges'personnel training" by interviewing and distributing questionnaires to 40 graduate students with overseas background and 600 college students from Chinese "985 project universities". The result indicated that the source of power for "The COQ converted to Quality" was the "Cultural Capital" from the college to the college students; the dominant path for the "COQ to Quality" of Chinese colleges'personnel training is " Cultural Capital→Teaching & Research→Serving Students→Individual Human Capital→Individual Social Capital". As the benchmarking of US "Ivy League", Chinese "985 Project Universities" urgently need to increase their inputs and strengthen management in "Cultural Capital", "Student Services" and "Instruction & Research" so as to improve the quality of service.