TQM in higher education

Monday, July 23, 2007

MANAGING FOR SOCIETY, THE MANILA TIMES By Evelio G. Echavez TQM in higher education

Many businesses around the world have embraced Total Quality Management (TQM) because of the success of well-known companies such as Motorola and Toyota. While TQM has been adopted by the manufacturing industry, higher educational institutions (HEIs) have been slow to recognize the importance of this management process. However, because of rising costs of higher education and increasing pressure to provide quality education, TQM is now being viewed as a way of solving problems within the HEIs in the United States and the Philippines as well. Nonetheless, the initiative of adopting TQM in higher education has been met with skep-ticism and resistance. Academics have given the following reasons for such reactions: (1) difficulty in identifying the appropriate management structure that encourages quality improvement without inhibiting the university’s diversity and creativity; (2) the belief of most members in the HEI organization that universities are already efficient; and (3) the emphasis of TQM on team effort, which runs counter to the culture of most universities, which reward individual accomplishments (i.e. faculty members advance in rank by earning advanced degrees and doing research). Due to these barriers to TQM implementation, prog-ress has been mostly in administrative areas, such as canteen operations, plant facilities planning and admission and enrollment processes. TQM is not used to address the critical problems facing universities today, which, among others, are curriculum design, allocation of faculty time and research output. While working as an executive for many years in industry, I led some organizations in successfully implementing TQM. In the academe, I continue to propagate continuous improvement by conducting TQM seminars for faculty and business people; actively collaborating with business; improving curriculum design; directing research efforts to relevant business topics; helping students focus their energies on important endeavors; and conducting planning sessions where faculty and staff are encouraged to suggest and plan how they can improve the delivery of services. Accreditation given to HEIs by bodies such as the Philippine Association of College and Universities Commission on Accreditation (PACUCOA) helps improve the quality of education. Other schools have certified their quality management system using the ISO 9000 standard. In both cases, however, the school may have the accreditation or certification and yet may not be able to deliver the desired quality of service because of lack of internalization among the school’s faculty and employees. Faculty members can improve the quality of their teaching by discussing, at the start of the term, their syllabi as well as their and their students’ expectations (in one class, I used a cause-and-effect diagram to identify the causes of effective learning process); thoroughly preparing for each class; getting regular feedback from students about what helped them in class and what should be changed or added; encouraging active participation in class discussion; and being open for consultation.