The Baldrige Criteria are all about asking the right questions to help you understand and improve how your organization operates. If your organization is a college or university, here are four fundamental questions recently posed by Fast Company:

• What do you really learn in college?
• Is what you learned in college really what’s producing the value?
• Or is it simply the mere fact of having a college degree?
• Or maybe there’s something more subtle going on—that is, people who go to college tend to be more motivated or hard-working and would have ended up succeeding whatever they did?

“Infographic of the Day: Is College Really Worth It?” by Cliff Kuang suggests answers to the these questions in an intriguing graphic. The key points are:

• Two million high school graduates enroll in college each year. One in three drops out after the first year, which wastes $9 billion.
• One out of five students can’t balance a checkbook.
• One out of two students can’t correctly analyze prose like news editorials. (How can a democracy function if our supposedly smartest young people cannot think critically?)
• The average college freshman spends over ten hours a week partying and eight hours a week studying—and more than 63 hours engaged with media and technology (games, cell phones, TV, social networks)
• 57% of students need six years or more to get their degree

Kenneth W. Monfort College of Business (MCB) received the Baldrige Award in 2004. In the Results section of its application summary, available here, it responds directly to the first two questions above:

• What do you really learn in college? The ETS Field Achievement Test in Business is the U.S. standard benchmarking measure of business core knowledge administered to seniors. MCB’s overall performance improved from 66% in 1993-94 to 90% in 2003-2004, putting it in the top 10%. MCB can identify exactly what its students learn in college.

• Is what you learned in college really what’s producing the value? More than 90% of employers rate MCB’s program quality good or excellent and 95% are satisfied with the MCB graduates they have hired. 100% of parents agree that “MCB is providing my son/daughter with the knowledge necessary to succeed in his/her area of emphasis.” Graduating students are asked to rate the value of the investment they made in their business degrees. They put MCB in the top 2.5% of business schools in the country. Students, employers, and parents agree that what students learned in college produced the value.

As the data show, one way colleges can provide definitive and positive responses to the value of the education they provide is by integrating the Baldrige model.

To read more about Baldrige and education, click on these articles:

• A New Bottom Line for Schools—and the Rest of Us
• Inspiration for a New Education System
• MHA Programs Fail to Prepare Students
• Accreditation through Baldrige
• Baldrige Goes to College

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