The Basics of College Research Scorecard

By Sam Miller

A college research scorecard is a strategic management system that colleges adopt as a method of enhancing the existing and upcoming school wide strategies and processes. The apparent and ultimate goal of the scorecard system is to convert the college's vision and mission into a realistic and meaningful set of indicators, which have connection to the strategies and goals of the school. This approach provides a medium for a two-way decision-making process through communicating, tracking, recording, measuring, and evaluating performance of strategies and goals.

The implementation of the college scorecard system makes use of a group of indicators that measure and define institutional effectiveness. Managers and concerned personnel will then view this effectiveness in four different viewpoints: Growth and innovation, operational and financial performance, external stakeholders, and internal stake holders. Each of these viewpoints has a balance of non-financial and financial measures and indicators. The purpose of incorporating a balance between the two primary indicators is to figure out the inputs of college administrators into the educational system and create indicators that acknowledge the results and explanations of an institutional activity. The college balanced scorecard system will then process, manage, evaluate, and produce report through a comprehensive format that will present how the college is doing in the actual setting.

The college scorecard takes advantage of benchmarks as the result of establishing a collaborative procedure of analysis, negotiation, and research. Different constituents and teams within the college organization are responsible for providing inputs to these collaborative processes. The resulting benchmarks will then provide means of assessing objectives and regulating strategies for achieving the goals.

In order to understand completely the complex process of a college scorecard, here is a good example. In an outcome measure data sheet for student-to-counselor ratio, the perspective that the manager should use is the external stakeholder. The next process is to determine the college strategy and the corresponding college goal. The manager may input "Student Access and Success" as the college strategy. It may also help if the manager will provide the description for this outcome measure data sheet. For instance, the description can be the number of credit students enrolled per counselor.

From this, the manager can then create the formula in measuring the student-to-counselor ratio. In formulating, it will help if the manager will indicate the participants of the activity. He or she should indicate if all full-time or part-time counseling staff would join the activity. Other likely factors that managers will include in this student to ratio data sheet are data source, data quality, data collector, scorecard control limits, benchmark rationale, and links to college wide initiatives.

Aside from the student-to-counselor ratio outcome data sheet, other common data sheets managers use for college research scorecard are course completion rate, PIF funding, grant allocations, PDF or professional development funding, PIF funds, overall ratings for the community perception, overall employee satisfaction, recipient finance aid rate, FTES all courses, and term persistence rates. Remember, that indicators alone are not enough. It should be functional, realistic, meaningful, and relevant to the school's goals and strategies.

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