Identifying improving institutions in higher education

There is little agreement over what metrics, or combination of metrics, provide an adequate assessment of overall institutional effectiveness in higher education. Verifiable institutional improvement is an extremely powerful outcome in that sector, yet determining how or if such improvement can be measured has been little studied. Quantification of institutional improvement over time may provide the common denominator and eraser of disparities in institution type or relative wealth that hobble existing comparative higher education measurement methods. A balanced scorecard employing a mixture of 11 financial and non-financial performance indicators drawn from IPEDS data from 386 members of the Council of Independent Colleges was used to rank and identify colleges that had the highest level of overall improvement from 2004-2009. Four cases were constructed that used different combinations of performance indicators to see if some colleges consistently rose to the top of the balanced scorecard’s rankings using different ranking criteria. The results of the study showed that (a) the balanced scorecard accurately captured increases and decreases in the actual performance of the study colleges; (b) there were quantifiable differences in the degree of longitudinal improvement among the study population; (c) the top-performing colleges were consistent in their superior performance across cases; (d) the colleges that attained high levels of improvement were found at all levels of the academic prestige hierarchy; and (e) they attained improvement via a number of pathways.;The study further revealed that intervals at the top of the ranking hierarchy were much wider than in lower reaches, thus suggesting a pattern of purposefulness to improvement on the part of the high-performance colleges in the study. A qualitative case study was carried out via interviews with officials at four of the most-improved colleges which revealed a focus on, and commitment to, institutional improvement. Both the quantitative and qualitative findings suggest that improvement may be an organizational competency as much as it is an attribute, and it may be attained in a number of ways by any type of college regardless of standing in other college rankings.