A prActicAl guide Benchmarking in european Higher education

Benchmarking in higher education
For higher education institutions the difficulty of defining ‘good performance’
may be even greater than in many other public organisations because higher
education institutions are ‘multi-product firms’, not only providing education
in different fields of knowledge, but also results of scholarship and research
(fundamental or applied), and having a third mission to engage with the local
or regional community and economy in various ways. The tasks of higher
education institutions are, moreover, ever-changing due to endogenous
developments (new knowledge and methods of research and teaching
emerging from the knowledge fields) as well as exogenous developments
(e.g. authorities requiring new tasks). Accordingly there are many different
processes about which mutual learning might be beneficial and many potential
KPIs to inform about them.
In the USA benchmarking was first introduced in higher education by NACUBO
(National Association of Colleges and University Business Officers, www.
nacubo.org). Overall, early approaches developed in the US were not true
benchmarking in our use of the term but “the generation of management
information which produces performance indicators and may lead to identification
of benchmarks, but does not often extend to benchmarking by identifying
best practice and adapting them to achieve continuous improvement
in institutional contexts” (Farquhar 1998).
In Australia, as elsewhere, the development of benchmarking was linked to
the quality enhancement movement and the need to demonstrate comparative
quality and efficiency of university operations. Benchmarking approaches
have been developed at the national level, internationally, by universities
themselves or with the support of consulting firms. In its report on Benchmarking
in Higher Education (Stella and Woodhouse, 2007), AUQA, the Australian
Universities Quality Agency, concluded that much more needed to be
done since there was little systematic use of benchmarking to monitor institutional
performance, that there was no clear view of the reasons to initiate
benchmarking strategies and a lack of clear understanding of the approach.
A Practical Guide - Benchmarking in European Higher Education
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