Six Sigma Approach to Quality and Productivity Improvement in an Institution for Higher Education in the United States

Institutions for higher educations including universities and four year in the United States have been continuously striving for higher quality under the continuous pressure of public scrutinizes, budget crunch and cut in private, state and federal funding. While demand for high quality and productivity in higher education has been continuously growing, the nations' institutions of higher education are still run like seasonal businesses with escalating cost and low productivity. This paper attempts to develop a model for Six Sigma approach to improve quality and productivity in institute of higher education in the United States. Introduction Our nation's institutions of higher education are continuously seeking creative ways to manage the ever increasing costs of providing quality higher education to our growing young middle class high school graduates under constant pressure of public criticism, and cut in private and public funding with very little success. A recent survey revealed that 93% of the American public agreed with the proposition that colleges and universities are among the most valuable resources to the U.S (Gilbertson, 2004). On the other hand, funding for higher education has been continuously dwindling and losing priority and public support due to intense desire of tax payers for immediate tax relief. Consequently, there has been efforts to raise income by such measures such as fund raising campaigns, seeking endowment and alumni support and unfair tuition rate hikes. While taking cost cutting measures such as hiring freeze, not even replacing retiring faculty and staff with new ones, increasing faculty loads and even increasing class size by adding more chairs in the class rooms and teaching classes with part-time lesser qualified faculty and graduate students. These traditional common income raising and cost cutting measures will eventually lower the quality of our higher in the long run, Since there is no quick fix of this long term problem unless academic administration's traditional old fashion easy going attitude and bureaucratic management approaches are replaced by innovative and aggressive management approaches such as Quality Function Deployment (QFD), Six Sigma Quality management, and Lean Service Management (LSM), many of our nation's institutions of higher education will soon run bankrupt and our nation will face a major crisis in the coming decades Goals and Mission of Institutions of Higher Education Setting goals, and expressed them in written mission statements is one of the most important responsibilities of top management. The top management such as a President, or a CEO of an organization is supposed to have a vision of the organization he/she leads and must set appropriate, feasible, and achievable goals and share mem with its external and internal environment clearly by expressing them verbally and preferably in black and white. W. Edward Deming, who is considered as Father of quality management and in his Fourteen point suggestions for achieving for quality in an organization, stated that the top management of an organization who aspire for quality, must first express and share his aspiration for quality by mission statements printed and published clearly stating Quality as the most important goal ( Deming, 1960). But a recent quality management survey of randomly selected sample of 100 nation's universities and four year reveals that less than 10% of them have a clear cut written mission statement. Can Universities be Run like a Business Enterprise? Many advocates that our institutions of higher education should be run like a business enterprise and not like a charitable organization, a religious organizations, a health care provider, a media service or a local government. Also in a recent survey 90% of respondents expressed a higher confidence on academic administrations, than on that of churches, health care providers, media services, and local government (Gilbertson, 2004). …