To implement Total Quality Management concepts successfully, colleges and universities must change their cultures significantly. In higher education, with its organizational characteristics and traditions, authority relationships between faculty and administrators must be recognized, and some changes in the role and attention of leaders must…

Essex Community College (Maryland) has used issue-oriented planning to maintain flexibility and adaptability while responding to environmental changes. Issues addressed by centralized and structured processes include management information systems, budget development, and external resource development. Issues addressed by decentralized processes…

Institutional researchers and planners can play a key role in the application of Total Quality Management (TMQ) to institutional processes by exciting others about TMQ, exploring with others the possibilities of TMQ, clarifying the principles through application, and crystallizing the benefits through action. (Author/MSE)

Results from a project of linked alumni and employer surveys at North Carolina State University were analyzed to explore the comparability of the ratings. A survey of administrators was subsequently undertaken to explore the impact of survey-based assessment information on planning, assessment, curriculum revision, and customer satisfaction at the…

Because of a fundamental shift in the way decisions are being made in colleges and universities, institutional researchers in the twenty-first century will no longer merely collect, analyze, and disseminate information to support decision making. They must also become information architects, change agents, and consultants of choice within their…