Applying Benchmarking in Higher Education

Education is fundamental to development and growth. The human mind makes possible all development achievements, from health advances and agricultural innovations to efficient public administration and private sector growth. For countries to reap these benefits fully, they need to unleash the potential of the human mind. And there is no better tool for doing so than education.

Twenty years ago, government officials and development partners met to affirm the importance of education in development—on economic development and broadly on improving people’s lives—and together declared Education for All as a goal. While enrolments have risen in promising fashion around the world, learning levels have remained disappointingly and many remain left behind. Because growth, development, and poverty reduction depend on the knowledge and skills that people acquire, not the number of years that they sit in a classroom, we must transform our call to action from Education for All to Learning for All.

Achieving learning for all will be challenging, but it is the right agenda for the next decade. It is the knowledge and skills that children and youth acquire today—not simply their school attendance—that will drive their employability, productivity, health, and well-being in the decades to come, and that will help ensure that their communities and nations thrive.

New technologies like AI, machine learning, and educational software aren't just changing the field for students, they're shaking up the role of educators, creating philosoph shifts in approaches to teaching, and remodeling the classroom. 

International Council of Technology, Management and Applied Engineering Inc, a global not for profit organisation is working hard on defining "Future Standards, Best Practices & Guidelines in the Higher Education Globally" or "Future Ready Education Framework".

Benchmarking has proved to be an effective method to identify best practice information and improve processes in an organization. Although the technique has been used widely in business and industry, the concept has not been broadly embraced and applied in higher education.

In addition, the impediments to the application of benchmarking in higher education are discussed and recommendations are made regarding how higher education can better benefit from the application of benchmarking.

1. Internal benchmarking—Work processes are compared between departments, divisions, or other internal company segments. Advantages of such benchmarking include the ease of data collection and the definition of areas for future external investigations. The primary disadvantage of internal benchmarking is a lower probability that it will yield significant process improvement breakthroughs.

2. Competitive benchmarking—An organization’s performance is measured against its peers or competitors. In competitive benchmarking, a consultant or other third party, rather than the organization itself, often collects and analyzes the data because of its proprietary nature.

3. Functional/industry benchmarking—An organization’s performance is compared against similar processes in the same function but at companies outside its own industry. This type of benchmarking is an opportunity for breakthrough improvements by analyzing high-performing processes across a variety of industries and organizations.

4. Generic process/“best-in-class” benchmarking -- One organization’s processes are compared against exemplars of truly innovative practices and worldclass performance levels, regardless of industry. This type of benchmarking makes the broadest use of data collection. One difficulty is in understanding how processes translate across industries; however, generic benchmarking often can result in an organization’s drastically altering its ideas of its performance capability and in the reengineering of business processes.

All benchmarking processes can be boiled down to four basic steps.

1. Planning the study—identifying what processes will be compared, with what metrics, with which benchmark partner(s)

2. Collecting the data—from primary or secondary sources

3. Analyzing the data—documentation of best practices and identification of performance gaps

4. Taking action—specifying improvement programs and action items, and monitoring results

Benchmarking enables an organization to learn best practices—or at least better practices—for improving its operations. In order to benefit even more from benchmarking, higher education must focus on the following:

• What matters most to its students and stakeholders
• High-cost processes
• Those things that are differentiators for their institutions
• Development of Collaboration, Innovation, EQ Mindset
• Development of Body of Knowledge

This will facilitate process improvements where the impact and payoff will be most beneficial. As benchmarking practice develops and matures in higher education, it will require looking outside the academy to uncover more creative ideas and practices that can be adapted and implemented.