In fact, the ability of any higher education system to discharge these functions - to meet people's learning needs to develop and transmit appropriate skills, and to create relevant and useful knowledge - is a key index of a society's cultural, social and economic vitality and well-being.

There is a high correlation, globally, between excellent higher education and overall national achievements in development, growth, competitiveness and welfare. For the working adult, the crucial challenge is to ensure that higher education can play this role: that it can succeed in stimulating, directing and utilizing the creative and intellectual energies of the working/adult population.

Still other critics are warning that there is a failure of higher education to prepare students for jobs of the 21st century. Even employees already in the work force does not have the right skills for corporate needs of the future and nothing is being done to teach them. Because of the constantly changing job skills needed in our high-tech society, most college graduates will not be able to compete adequately by the year 2000 (Vella, 1995).

Some observers claim that universities are becoming more like corporations and corporations are becoming more like universities. The truth is that them walls have been breached, and higher education is in the marketplace. Colleges and universities compete with business and industry for students and for accountants and engineers. Because what we do on the boundaries of our society, how wide we set those boundaries, and how inclusively we define tolerable behavior tells us how free we truly are as a nation, the academic sanctuary is important.

In other words, the academy's alliances with the real world are still limited by its essential function of protecting inquiry and criticism in all disciplines, whether in matters scientific, political, esthetic, or economic. And it is still the case that the freedom of belief and speech, the freedom to be critical, is more frequently, albeit not perfectly, protected in university than in corporate settings. It is therefore important to ask to what extent any proposed or operating linkage between the business and higher education Communities may restrict or expand either institution's ability to define and enforce its own essence of proper behavior. That these boundaries and restrictions exist is readily acknowledged, providing a source of endlessly ebbing and flowing debate (Browne-Miller, 1995). Whether the present enthusiasm for post-secondary liaisons with the corporate community may be of such a scale as to force historic shifts in the relationship is a more immediate and substantial question.

The question is made even more complex by the fact that post-secondary institutions, having become increasingly dependent on federal and state government aids, are now battered by government regulations and declining enrollments among youth (Fetter, 1995). In the face of declining resources, institutions are turning toward corporations in search of sympathy, political allies, and new resources and enrollments, perhaps without thinking through the consequences of these alliances. The question of how best to deliver higher education services to traditional students and working adults presents the issue of how well education is functioning to renew and improve the American labor force.

Forecasters, taking note of the constant changes in production and service industries, predict that 20 million jobs in the United States will require different skills than are required today. Further, three out of every four workers will require retraining before the year 2000 (Rendon, et al., 1995). Should workers expect higher education to equip them with training and skills that will be required by corporate America? Out of a sense of justice and to provide enough competent people to staff the work force, the higher education system must be open. It must not draw a line between the well-educated and the other half. All of societies' members must be educated. All people, whatever their origin or wealth, must have access to higher education and, through it, to upward mobility. More than ever, education will fuel our economy and shape our society.

"…You have to learn to think in new ways, because your work has changed. I mean, typewriters used to do 100 words a minute. Word processors, computers, do 200 words a minute. Voice activated computers are going to do 300 words a minute. Your short-term memory can’t keep up.

I mean, how many of you are having trouble with your short-term memory? You walk across a room; you can’t remember why you’re there. You’ve forgotten your multiplication above seven. You’re having trouble with you spelling. Someone is walking down the hall toward you, you can’t remember who they are. And they’re an important client; they may even be your boss. Our short-term memory can’t keep up.

Imagine what it was like at the turn of the century. In a whole week, riding around on your horse on your farm, how much actually came into your brain? Versus driving to work now, for a half an hour, listening to the radio.

You can get some ideas of just the sheer multiplication of data. And your short-term memory can only hold five, plus or minus two items, at any one time. You put more in, and stuff falls out. Believe me, the only reason 25-year-olds can remember things is they have empty space.

You have coming into your brain 400 times the data of a Renaissance man, and you have the same basic brain. Because we believe that intelligence is memory.

Because when we were gathered around the campfire-and we didn’t even have pencils-the person that could remember the medical plants, who knew the oral traditions, who knew the game patterns, they were the most valuable person in the tribe.

But we know not that memory is relatively low-level intelligence. I mean, we can teach pigeons to spell three-letter words. We’re now moving to a new kind of intelligence. Information retrieval, process, strategy, the ability to problem solve, the highest use of the brain of homo sapiens…"

As educators we have used the normal curve in grading students for so long that we have come to believe in it. Achievement measures are designed to detect differences among our learners – even if the differences are trivial in terms of the subject matter. We then distribute our grades in a normal fashion. In any group of students we expect to have some small percentages received a grade of A. We are surprised when the figures differ greatly from about 10 percent. We are also prepared to fail an equal proportion of students. Quite frequently, this failure is determined by the rank order of the students in the group rather than by their failure to grasp the essential ideas of the course.

Having become accustomed to the normal distribution, we set grade policies in these terms and are horrified when some teacher attempts to recommend a very different distribution of marks. Administrators are constantly on the alert to control teachers who are "too easy" or "too hard" in their grading……Finally, we proceed in our teaching as though only the minority of our students should be able to learn what we have to teach.

The University of Phoenix realizes that higher education can no longer afford to simply herd students into educational holding pens, throw in a little mush and hope for the best. The University has devised core-competency based courses that prepare working adults to learn the specific things that they need to be able to do in order to earn a living and to serve as a responsible member of society. The core competencies are as follows:

• Written Communication Skills
• Oral Presentation Skills
• Collaborative Skill
• Quantitative Analysis Skill
• Interpersonal Skills
• Critical Thinking Skills
• Computer/Software Applications
  

"…At the Nevada Campus, we expect our students to do well. Plus, our grading philosophies contrast with the traditional idea of using grades to rank students from best to worst. If, for whatever reason, everybody in your class is doing very good or excellent work, everyone in your class can get A’s and B’s. The reason everybody can receive the same grade is that the instructors look at how well students’ master the materials they are presented in our accelerated programs. To do otherwise and grade students in relation to each other could mean that a student who did better than everyone else would get an A even if the student did not meet the standards..." ( Hunt,1999).

• Institutional research units;
• management information units;
• sub-committees of academic boards/senate;
• standing institutional audits and review bodies;
• specially convened review boards;
• faculty-based units;
• sub-committees of faculty boards;
• program boards (or sub-committees, program directors);
• individual teachers and researchers;
• student organizations;
• formal or ad hoc groups of students at program or course level;
• external examiners. These are usually appointed by the institution to provide an external view of the academic process, standards of practice and, where appropriate, professional development. They tend to be independent academic appraisals although the outcomes are usually presented in confidence to the institution (Silver,1993)

*Invited consultants.

Learning and teaching:

• curriculum;
• curriculum delivery;
• teacher performance;
• assessment (grading) of students;
• standards of academic attainment;
• standards of competence;
• employability of graduates.

Resources:

• computing;
• library (number of volumes);
• space (floor space per student).

Research:

• research outputs;
• research costs;
• research community.

Management:

• management information systems;
• quality systems.

(Rarely the quality of management per se)

• community impact;
• links with employers.

This is a quite staggering degree of examination, which has grown up rapidly

Over the last decade and reflects the intrusion of the evaluative state into all areas of public life (Neave, 1998).

The academic quality measurement at the University of Phoenix in all of its programs, or elements of programs, leading to a degree or other higher education award has at its simplest level, encouraged or even forced compliance in the production of information, be it statistical data, prospectuses, or course documents. Such compliance means that taken-for-granted practices and procedures have had to be confronted and clearly documented. It represents the minimum required shift from an entirely producer-oriented approach to higher education to one that acknowledges the rights of other stakeholders to minimum information and a degree of ‘service’.’(Harvey, 1998b).

The awarding institution accepts responsibility for the quality of its programs as a whole by assuring the quality and standards of the teaching provided, of systematic syntagma student support and of other learning support facilities.

The quality control of approved Adult Higher Education Institutions should be explicit, comprehensive and documented. The Academic Quality measurements should include provision for:

Excellence in Education

A traditional concept linked to the idea of ‘excellence’, usually operationalized as exceptionally high standards of academic achievement. Quality is achieved if the standards are surpassed. Perfection or consistency focuses on process and sets specifications that it aims to meet. Quality in this sense is summed up by the interrelated ideas of zero defects and getting things right the first time. (Harvey, L. and Green, D., 1993).

Fitness for purpose

Judges quality in terms of the extent to which a product or service meets its stated purpose. The purpose may be customer-defined to meet requirements or (In-education) institution-defined to reflect institutional mission or course Objectives. (Harvey, L., 1990).

Value for money

Assesses quality in terms of return on investment or expenditure. At the heart of the value-for-money approach in education is the notion of accountability. Public services, including education, are expected to be accountable to the funders. Increasingly, students are also considering their own investment in higher education in value-for-money terms. (Harvey, L. and Macdonald, M., 1993).

Transformation

Sees quality as a process of change, which in higher education adds value to students through their learning experience. Education is not traditionally a service for a customer but an ongoing process of transformation of the participant. This leads to two notions of transformative quality in education: enhancing the consumer and empowering the consumer. overlapping constructs.

It has been suggested that transformation is a meta-quality concept and that other concepts such as perfection, high standards, fitness for purpose and value for money are possible (although not very good) operationalizations of the transformative process rather than ends in themselves. (Harvey, 1994, p. 51; Harvey & Knight, 1996, pp. 14–15).

Academic standards

The demonstrated ability to meet specified level of academic attainment. For andragogy, the ability of students to be able to do those things designated as appropriate at a given level of education. Usually, the measured competence of an individual in attaining specified (or implied) course aims and objectives, operationalized via performance on assessed pieces of work. For research, the ability to undertake effective scholarship or produce new knowledge, which is assessed via peer recognition. (Harvey, L. and Knight, P., 1996).

Standards of competence

Demonstration that a specified level of ability on a range of competencies has been achieved. Competencies may include general transferable skills required by employers; academic (‘higher level’) skills implicit or explicit in the attainment of degree status or in a post-graduation academic apprenticeship; particular abilities Congruent with induction into a profession. (Horsburgh, 1999).

Service standards

Are measures devised to assess identified elements of the service provided against specified benchmarks. Elements assessed include activities of service providers and facilities within which the service takes place. Benchmarks specified in ‘contracts’ such as student charters tend to be quantified and restricted to measurable items. Post hoc measurement of customer opinions (satisfaction) is used as indicators of service provision. Thus, service standards in higher education parallel consumer standards. (Harvey, L., 1995).

Standards

Harvey and Mason, (1995) define standards as measures of what is achieved, usually outcome standards. (Although, of course, value-added evaluations depend on the measurement of some form of input standards against which the output standard can be compared).

• the academic attainment of students and research attainment of staff;
• levels of competence of students from professional courses; service standards (such as teaching standards and the standard of learning resources);
• Organizational standards.

The ‘politics of quality’

The ‘politics of quality’ refers to the macro and micro agendas that accompany the Introduction of quality monitoring procedures. It is naive to think that quality monitoring is not linked to political agendas. Indeed, Alvesson & Willmott, (1996, p. 11), suggest that the achievement of quality in higher education ‘is essentially political in origin’. The politics, though, are concealed behind a facade that suggests ‘that "achieving quality" is amenable to technical and bureaucratic solutions’. (Harvey, L., 1995b).

Thus, any evaluation of academic quality systems needs to unravel the politics of quality. Equally, there is also a need, as in any social science, to explore the values and political agendas of researchers as well as those who commissioned the research.

At the risk of oversimplification, academic quality models can be seen to have three underlying rationales, each of which have political implications. Academic Quality is used to ensure or encourage:

• accountability;
• compliance;
• improvement.

Accountability

With pressure on budgets and a growing ethos of evaluation, higher education has had to become more accountable for the money it receives. In effect, this means that higher education must not only be explicit about where it spends the money, but also must endeavor to provide good value for the money it receives.

The ‘politics of quality’ might also include the role that quality monitoring has in introducing value-for-money practices, or redistributing limited resources on the basis of an apparent value-for-money exercise, such as a research assessment exercise where money is concentrated in institutions that provide ‘excellent’ research output, or, as Lee and Harley suggest, concentrated in institutions that adhere to a particular paradigm.

Compliance

Academic Quality also encourages compliance to (emerging or existing) Government policy and Regional Accrediting preferences or the preferences or policy of stakeholders such as professional bodies and employer lobbies. Government is usually the most important and powerful as far as higher education goes because it supplies so much of the money and in many cases controls the licensing of institutions. Governments around the United States are looking for higher education to be more responsive, including: making higher education more relevant to social and economic needs widening access to higher Education; expanding numbers, usually in the face of decreasing unit cost; ensuring comparability of provision and procedures, within and between institutions, including international comparisons; responding to value for money imperatives. (Barrow, 1999).

‘Quality’ has been used as a tool to ensure some degree of compliance to these overt political agendas as well as to less overt ones, such as attempts to reduce the autonomy of and questioning the extent to which mass higher education is producing ‘work-ready’ graduates.

Improvement

Academic Quality is usually seen as leading to improvements in the quality of processes or the standards of outcomes. On the surface, improvement appears to be an uncontentious goal. However, once we ask what is to be improved? In what ways? and for whose benefit? then the political dimension is immediately evident. Value-for-money improvements may, for example, not be congruous with Transformative improvement. (Vroeijenstijn, 1995; Middlehurst & Woodhouse, 1995).

The crucial feature is what constitutes a valuable process in the measurement of academic quality. Harvey (1995) suggests it needs to be one undertaken in a spirit of responsiveness to stakeholders — new collegialism rather than cloisterism. There is growing concern about the articulation between formal managerialist structures, and less formal collegiate processes. A recurring theme is the dissolution of trust between academics and managers (Trow, 1994, 1996).

While managerialist structures are common in the non-traditional milieu, external monitoring still tends to be perceived by some adjunct faculty, as reinforcing managerialism and as compromising mutual trust.

In particular, there is a shortage of research into the impact on the student experience. There is a lack of research that starts from the transformative learning of the student and attempts to unravel an array of interrelated ‘factors’. However, such research should not become preoccupied with building and Validating static causal models or systems. Rather, what is needed is research that critically deconstructs the politics and ideology of the learning situation .It would be timely to develop a University of Phoenix system wide collaborative and comparative study to evaluate quality issues.

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