"Accountability" is a hot topic in education, at least in the United States. For example, the federal government's 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act mandates quantitative standards for schools, with scores based on testing. Legislators who voted the act into law said it would make primary and secondary schools more accountable to the public.
At the heart of accountability is measurement. The so-called NCLB Dashboard of accountability is meant to show whether individual states are reaching the federal government's arbitrary standards. Many feel that the NCLB goals represent an unfunded mandate, others say that the goals are overly simplistic, and still others criticize the metrics for focusing heavily on standardized test results. But even many of NCLB's critics believe that an asset as important as public education will benefit from more accountability of some kind. And the sheer volume of data generated around benchmarking schools' performance is a gold mine for analysts and researchers.
Encouraged by increased scrutiny of public schools, critics of post-secondary education are asking, "Shouldn't we hold colleges and universities to quantitative standards as well? What about assessment? How do we know whether colleges and universities are succeeding?"
Researchers and policy analysts have deployed a variety of metrics in the past to measure college and university effectiveness. Some focus on the long-term monetary benefit to the student, others on learning outcomes or career-preparedness.
However, critics of uniform standards for higher ed say that education is not an assembly line and that students are not widgets that can be manufactured to some arbitrary level of conformity. It's OK, critics say, if we have a general feel for how higher ed is faring; the inputs and outputs are too varied and diverse to submit for standardized scrutiny.
What does this have to do with alumni relations?
There's a parallel between this question ("Should we hold universities accountable in the same way we do primary and secondary education?") and the debate about measuring the effectiveness of alumni programming ("Can we hold alumni relations to numerical goals, as we do with development?').
For a long time, alumni professionals have bemoaned the lack of objective assessment measures for the profession (beyond tracking event attendance). Our fundraising colleagues produce the ubiquitous "progress toward goal" line graphs and "donations by source" pie charts. And recently, we have finally seen efforts meant to help alumni officers gauge the effectiveness of their programs and compare their progress.
As I noted above, those who resist making higher ed accountable say "Learners are not widgets. It's OK if we don't have numerical assessment. Student achievement is too hard to measure with a quantitative value."
So I wonder, what if maybe — just maybe — it's OK if we don't have strict quantitative measurements in alumni relations? The pressure to "prove" our worth is partly an outcome of the accountability trend within advancement itself. If we resisted it, the campus finance office would not know whether we were providing a reasonable "return on investment." But who else would care? And would we be doing a worse job if we didn't measure? Would our institutions — or the alumni — be worse off?
I'm not sure, and I'm not arguing against metrics. But it's worth asking these questions periodically to make sure we're using our time effectively to improve future operations.
Collegiate Learning Assessment Consortium
Chronicle Article on Europe's Example for America [subscription required]