Origins, Part IV: Inputs versus Outputs, versus Process

This post originally appeared in my short-lived blog Truth and Beauty, and was moved to this blog in June, 2007.

As I've learned the ways that the academy is viewed, it seems that a lot if boils down to inputs and outputs--inputs being the "stuff" that makes up a college, from buildings to curriculum to faculty and support staff; outputs being student success rates, research, etc.

It appears to me that in this age of accountabilty in education that there is some confusion about which of these things we ought to be paying most attention to. What really matters about a college? If you look at what the accreditors have looked at for many years, you'd probably say that what matters are the inputs. Accreditors have traditionally looked primarily at things like how well the curriculum is structured, how governance works, how many volumes there are in the library, how much faculty and administrators are paid, and other things related to the composition of the institution.

More and more, however, we're starting to see a trend toward looking more closely at the outputs. Especially for public institutions, there is an increasing pressure to track and report student success and other outcome measures. Public and private institutions alike are finding that both regional and national/professional accreditors are putting more and more outcomes assessment into their accreditation standards.

I think that both of these views on what makes for a good institution come up short. For me, it feels that we need to understand that the sustainable success of an institution lies neither in its inputs or its outcomes. Instead, it is the capacity of the institution to really understand the connection between its inputs and outputs that matters, in my view. An institution that's doing poorly on outcomes needs to be able to assess why it's doing poorly--which of its strategies or tactics (inputs) are acting as barriers to success? An institution that's doing well needs to know how to sustain success by understanding which inputs are bolstering it.

In either situation, an institution has to have the capacity to understand that over time there are likely to be shifts in what sustains or blocks success, and they need good planning capacity to lay out evolving strategies and tactics.

Maybe this capacity--the ability to assess and to plan--is itself an input. But I think that we should look at the institutional research and assessment capacity as the third leg of a tripod that includes inputs, outcomes and this process of analyzing and planning.