AS to STC, the mission statement for seattle teachers college is "lower the cost and widen access to education while ever improving student and instructor satisfaction." I hope to have a page on our website and perhaps in each catalog devoted to metrics demonstrating whether we are meeting our mission. The "lower the cost" will be easy to show, just state nominally what going rates were and what they are now. Widening the access gets to census data on who we are reaching, and is tied up with our lists, mailings, and what we've been talking about... I project an early September mailing to start this ball rolling, which as I understand it is benchmarking.
Ever improving student and instructor satisfaction will be measured by feedback forms. About a decade ago a couple of UC Berkeley rocket scientists (I am not making that up) developed a system for comparing UCB accounting 101 student feedback to MIT accounting 101 feedback to see whose was better. No idea how they were doing it, but the company was called coursemetrics,com, and it went under, or perhaps blew up like a bad space mission. I have their marketing material, and so I was hoping someday to track down the principals and see if there was anything to salvage. It is too late to make a long story short, but the idea is not to measure just present STC student and instructor satisfaction against previous STC performance, but STC against everyone else.
Also here has been some growth in targeting the competition. There was a series of expose articles on the University of Washington administration double and triple dipping... apparently one can max out a pension, so the trick is to retire one day and then be rehired the next day in the same job at the same rate and start a second pension, while collecting on the first. Some people retire and do the same job as a consultant at super premium rates. Anyway, people must have short memories because these articles are run every couple of years and nothing happens.
It dawned on me that the University of Washington is not competition, indeed, no part of the state school system is competition for Seattle Teachers College. When washington state was formed in 1889, the progressive movement was in full bloom, so to please those elements back East WAshington state made education the core of its mission, and dedicated 1/16th of the land to support free, compulsory, public education. The rents from downtown seattle feed directly to UW. Point is, government run schools are political entities, not market entities. if there are problems with these schools, the solutions must come from the legislature, not the market. (When I was getting my MA in Ed, talk of public/private initiatives was all the rage. I could not put my finger on it, but it struck me as somehow off.)
Definitions are a problem, because what we call public schools are actually quite limited in access, and what we call private are open to all comers. And private schools can be non-profit or profit ventures. Better definitions may be state vs market schools. STC competition is the market schools, say Chapman, U of Phoenix, Art Institute of (name a city) Antioch and City U. These schools are largely predatory, recruiting the hapless and loading them up with debt. The system is wildly profitable, but would not work without guaranteed student loans (which are taxpayer guaranteed) and the risk to the taxpayers is ostensibly diminished because student loans may not be discharged in bankruptcy, something many of the students will need to consider in their futures. Of the market schools, for-profit and non-profit, non profit is a very distorted term, a means of earning wider margins due to tax-exempt status so the administrators (owners) can be paid all the more. Yes, an administrator taking home 11 million dollars (U of Phoenix co-ceo) which would be taxable, except as Sen Reid says, taxes are voluntary in USA. These people know how to legally avoid taxes on their incomes, profit or non-profit..
To get in on this gig a school must be accredited, and as these things go, the accreditation bodies, like the risk rating agencies, are loaded up with people from chapman, u of phoenix, city u, etc.
A school that depends on govt guaranteed student loans is hardly a market entity. But such schools can pull out the money with impunity like a market entity. Some people will argue without student loans the students cannot get the education they need. But this misses the point, the loans cover what these schools charge, not what an education costs. Without the guarantees of the loans, no one would front so much money to a student, the schools gladly absorb as much money as is available, spread it around thick internally, and send the student off perniciously burdened. An education does not cost what these schools charge. Almost everyone can afford with what they normally earn an education superior to anything these accredited schools offer. Accreditation is the Berlin Wall of education. Seattle Teachers College will work to bring down that wall. We will never be accredited. Our competition is those monsters, neither state nor market, or half state half market, which prey on and devour the young, the poor, the gullible. Seattle teachers college will give a first rate education for those who know better and would never enroll in such schools, and a fair break, an alternative, to the students preyed upon by such schools.
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