Lessons from Toyota

I have been teaching so long that I find myself looking for the teachable moment in just about any experience.  This morning I found myself looking for lessons in the Toyota hearings.

The message from Toyota is that they now recognize they grew too fast in recent years by focusing on sales volume over safety and quality.  They admit to having lost sight of their mission.

I am not surprised.  For many stockholders the purpose of business is to make as much money as possible this quarter.  Worry about the next quarter when it comes.  This short-term thinking leads to a focus on sales over quality and reputation, because quality will not effect reputation until some future quarter.  The banking and real estate collapses also fit this pattern.

What does this have to do with higher education?  In much of higher education the focus in recent decades, particularly in public higher education, has been increasingly on enrollment growth and degrees granted.  But what of the quality of product.  When your institution has 20K or more students there are just too many factors influencing how students advance that a school can't control.

Many schools have begun to emphasized quality and quantity of research scholarship rather than quality of graduate.  After all research quality is easier to build and control than graduate quality.  It's easier to take the smaller population of faculty and using tenure, lab space, etc as a cudgel, get research productivity.  If you then focus on research products, rather than your graduates to represent yourself you can send a reputation message that has little to do with the quality of the product the public is primarily paying for.  The research faculty can bring in postdocs and graduate students  and ignore the education of all but the best undergrads.

As the pundits and politicos cry about the the nation's place in an increasingly science and technology oriented world they may one day come to recognize that the focus on numbers of students and degrees granted over quality of graduate is a contributor to the problem.  This is a drum I beat regularly in this blog.  I do so in the belief that just like the pundits and politicos if I make the case often enough others will pick up the banner and the question of graduate quality might carry some weight in the discussion of the future of higher education.

T.S. Hall