Years ago, back when I took my first Lead Auditor training class, the instructor started by giving us a little history of the development of the ISO 9001 standard. He explained that it had started as an attempt to unify the various national Quality standards that governments had put in place a generation before, to standardize their procurement activities during World War Two. And he went on to say that over time the standard had gained an ever-wider acceptance. As an example, he remarked that some American universities (he named no names) had recently chosen to seek ISO 9001 certification instead of more traditional forms of academic accreditation.
During the break I asked him about this.
Me: You said that some universities are seeking ISO 9001 certification instead of accreditation, but how is it possible to certify a university?
Instructor: The same way you certify any other organization.
Me: But that can't be. The ISO 9001 standard is based on the concept of customer satisfaction. Who is the customer for a university?
Instructor: The students, of course.
Me: The students aren't customers. The students are the product!
This conversation didn't get very far.
But was I wrong? Narrowly speaking, even on my own terms, yes I was. I should have said that students were the raw materials, and that graduates were the product. But who is the customer? That answer is more elusive.
The people who pay the bills are most often the students' parents. To be sure, sometimes some or all of the expenses are covered by other entities, including the federal government (through measures like the G.I. Bill) or the universities themselves (through scholarships or financial aid awards).
Do those who pay the bills also enjoy the benefits? Only indirectly.
- The most direct beneficiaries of higher education are, indeed, the graduates themselves, even though I have also identified them as the products.
- The next-most direct beneficiaries are probably their future employers, who benefit from hiring an educated labor force and who (for the most part) pay nothing at all into the educational process.*
- Parents, who pay most of the bills, get the benefit of seeing their children graduate (if you call that a benefit); in principle this should also mean that their children do better financially than they would otherwise have done in life, and that the children are therefore less likely to depend on their parents for financial support as adults.**
- Other entities who contribute towards educational costs presumably get something out of it, but again the benefit is indirect: when the federal government contributes money to educate military veterans, it supports the well-being of those veterans in reward for their service;*** when a university awards scholarships or financial aid, it enables students of modest means to attend when they otherwise could not, thus enhancing the overall diversity of the student body.
- There is also an idea that society-at-large benefits from having a more-educated population. Partly the supposition is that the educated should have more options in life than the uneducated and should therefore be less likely to turn to crime out of financial desperation.** Partly it may be thought that there are less tangible benefits as well. But in any event, the benefits that accrue to society from education are at best very indirect, and there is no financial contribution from society at all (unless you count taxes).
While the most recent (2015) edition of the ISO 9001 standard still insists that it applies "when an organization ... aims to enhance customer satisfaction" [ISO 9001:2015, 1(b)], it also introduces the concept of "interested parties." There is in fact a general statement that "the concept of interested parties extends beyond a focus solely on the customer. It is important to consider all relevant interested parties." [ISO 9000:2015, 2.2.4.] And this expansion of scope dissolves all the complexities involved in identifying a university's customer, because all the parties named above are interested parties: students, employers, parents, governments, universities, and yes, society as a whole. If a university were to document the complete Context of its Organization, all of them would show up on the list along with their respective needs and expectations. And the university could then take all these into account in establishing its Quality Management System and defining its program.
So does that mean that my instructor was right after all? Can a university forego traditional accreditation and pursue ISO 9001 certification instead? Not so fast.
Of course a university can do whatever it likes in this regard. It's a free country. But there is an important difference between traditional academic accreditation and ISO 9001 certification. Traditional accreditation measures an institution against standards that are external to the institution itself; but ISO 9001 requires the organization itself to determine the scope and content of its own QMS [ISO 9001:2015, 4.3-4.4 et seq.]. So in principle a university could keep its ISO 9001 certification while operating in a way that would cause it to lose accreditation in a heartbeat.
But isn't this a spurious objection? Commercial companies could do the same thing, and maybe some do; but the majority don't. Commercial companies recognize that their reputations among customers are valuable, and so they count a reputation for high-quality products and services — along with fair and honest business practices — among the "needs and expectations" of their interested parties. Wouldn't any responsible university do the same? Why not count the accreditation authorities among their interested parties, in order to force themselves to meet those external standards along with other requirements? Surely that's no different from having to meet legal or regulatory requirements, which are likewise external to the organization.
Of course that's true. But if a university counts the accreditation authorities among its interested parties, then it hasn't given up on accreditation after all. The original assertion was about universities giving up on accreditation because they found ISO 9001 certification more valuable; but the argument in the previous paragraph seems to say that any university that wants ISO 9001 certification can (and perhaps should) nonetheless safeguard its reputation by keeping accreditation.
And in that case, why should the university seek ISO 9001 certification? What's the point?
Of course they might find it useful on its own, as a tool for organizing their operations and driving improvements. And in that case, by all means they should push ahead and let nothing get in their way. But unless and until some other, equivalent external standard emerges, I don't see any way that ISO 9001 can possibly replace academic accreditation for a university.
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* Of course there is room to argue that employers might pay higher wages to educated employees than to uneducated ones, and that the extra wages help pay back student loans owed by recent graduates. And of course employers pay taxes, which support government expenditures that include (among many other things) a certain level of expense for education. But in any event the contribution of employers towards the cost of education is very indirect, and nothing like in proportion to the advantage they receive from it.
** There is currently some level of debate in the United States over how far these theoretical benefits are borne out in practice today, but that's not my topic here.
*** The government might benefit in other ways as well.
The article raises so much confusion because it does not conform to the standard ISO 9000 definitions of certification, accreditation,customers, products, systems, and even interested groups. This is a big problem specially so when the writer-discussant imposes blindly his or her own understanding of ISO 9000 Quality Management System (QMS).
ReplyDeleteTo understand ISO 9000 QMS, one must learn first the standard definitions without doing which, s/he will just create confusion for self and others. Discussing ISO 9000 QMS sans reading and understanding the Standard terms and definitions is like firing a misguided missile without a pre-defined target. Without reading the standard terms and definitions first tells us the level of one's understanding of ISO 9000 QMS. Start first with the basics. Read the Standard Terms and Definitions.
Gosh, really? That sound serious. Let's look at what you're saying.
DeleteIn the first place, it would be very helpful if you could spell out what exactly I got confused about. It's easy to say "read the definitions," but which definitions did I get wrong, and how would it have changed my argument if I had gotten them right?
More basically, how would you answer the question that I start off with?
After that, sure, let's go look at ISO 9000:2015 to see what it says. It turns out that there are no definitions at all for the words "accreditation" and "certification" anywhere in ISO 9000:2015. (Of course "accreditation" is a term used in academic contexts.) The definition of "customer" at 3.2.4 reads: "person or organization (3.2.1) that could or does receive a product (3.7.6) or a service (3.7.7) that is intended for or required by this person or organization." It's true that this definition leaves out the question of who pays for the product or service, so perhaps I should have finessed that topic. But it wasn't a huge part of my argument. I think my basic question remains, though, whether the students of a university are customers or products. Do the students "receive" instruction? Yes. But does society "receive" the educated graduates? Also yes.
We can check the definition of "product" at 3.7.6, but I think that leaves us with the same ambiguity. We read that a "product" is the: "output (3.7.5) of an organization (3.2.1) that can be produced without any transaction taking place between the organization and the customer (3.2.4)." And sure, you can say that the educated graduates of a university are the outputs of the university's activities. So you could still call them "products" rather than "customers," if you wanted to.
It goes on like this. I'll stop here because none of the other terms cast any additional light on the topic.
In short, I really wish you had told me what was wrong with my fundamental conclusion, instead of just stopping with the definitions. You might have been onto something valuable, but I can't tell what it was. I'm sorry.
Very interesting read! I am in the process of certifying the snow division employees of a county within the State of Michigan.
ReplyDeleteI'd love to hear more about that. What is their reason for wanting certification? Is it because the discipline will drive good practices, or do they have some external stakeholder who wants to see it?
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