TQM in Higher Education Literature review Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2750 words

TQM in Higher Education - Literature review Example front, changes need to be made to ensure great campus, positive staff attitude, great spiritual environment, less bureaucracy and an enriching student life. According to Gary A. Berg 2008, a large amount of research on Total Quality Management has been focused on for private organizations. However, TQM has been widely used in student service and education fields. Lozier and Teeter (1993) were among the first researchers to focus on application of TQM to higher education. These researchers stress on stakeholder satisfaction as the most significant aspect of TQM in higher education. Juran defined quality as fitness for use and Crossby as conformance to requirements. However, Deming’s definition of is to follow quality as surpassing customer needs and expectations is the one that applies the most to higher education. One of the approaches to quality in higher education is to follow ISO 9000 in educational setup. According to this approach, the staff can be trained to control the behavior of the students (who are customers) rather than their ideas. A combination of responsive systems, implementation framework and staff empowerment would enable successful implementation of ISO 9000 in higher education system. However, some researchers have suggested a change in the education process by eliminating non-productive activities and hence improve the quality of higher education. According to H.J. De Jager & F.J. Nieuwenhuis 2005, there are three important features of TQM in educations according to a specific TQM model. These are leadership, scientific methods & tools and problem solving through teamwork. These three features are integrated to form a great organizational climate, a healthy training & education environment and provision of meaningful data. Customer service acts... This paper approves that the Australian universities brought improvements in their efficiency and accountability while realizing the benefits of economies of scale. These universities were provided additional funds by the government to enable quality assurance practices. However, most of the universities were self-accrediting and lacked external control. Australian Universities Quality Agency was formed to address this limitation. The author also gives example of the Swedish experience in implementing quality in higher education. Here the processes in the universities were decentralized and an improvement led model was followed. The funds were provided to institutions based on their performance and the quality models were customized as per the needs of each institution. This essay makes a conclusion that the quality initiatives in Canadian Universities remain limited to performance indication. This was also introduced with growing pressure from local magazines and government. Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada came up with performance indicators but they were not well accepted by the universities or the public. Most of the universities prefer to use their own list of performance indicators. Therefore, there has been an avoidance of public participation in quality assurance by Canadian universities.