Compacts take us into the metrics

In acknowledging this complexity it is not to argue we shouldn't measure performance in higher education or that we should not monitor standards. Of course we must be concerned with both.

The success of mission-based compacts - should we head in this direction - will rely heavily on government's and sector's confidence in the measurement of institutional performance against negotiated goals. In fact, performance measurement is a central element in a compacts approach, as Group of Eight executive director Michael Gallagher and others have stressed.

Compacts will help set the preconditions for a more diverse and responsive higher education sector. For this to be successful, our notions of standards and performance will need to be adjusted accordingly. We need to develop a performance indicator framework that supports and does not undermine differentiation, and which does not nurture the present stratification based on reputation and positional status.

In describing the idea of compacts in March, Innovation Minister Kim Carr said: "Universities will have a reciprocal responsibility to explain their purposes, and to report publicly on how well they have performed against their own goals and expected performance standards."

What might this look like in practice? Here there is much devil in the detail, for it is difficult to imagine the government handing over the entire measurement of performance to the institutions.

For compacts to be successful and for the sector to have confidence in a compacts-based funding model, there are four things we need to do.

First, develop agreed sector-wide metrics based on common definitions for measuring performance in the three main areas of performance: teaching and learning, research and research training, and community engagement or knowledge transfer.

Second, develop metrics that shift the emphasis to outcomes-impact measures of performance to complement input-process measures. Third, establish core performance measures for all institutions, regardless of negotiated mission. And fourth, develop a value-added conception of institutional performance in the area of student learning outcomes.

There is little reason why different metrics would be needed for individual institutions.

There is an inexorable trend towards more standardised, more independent testing of graduates' skills in higher education. Few would argue that such testing can tell us everything we wish to know, but it can tell us something.

Standardised testing in the school sector is criticised in the teaching profession, where the collection of data is seen variously to threaten professional judgment, to narrow what is valued in learning and to homogenise curriculums. Whatever approaches are taken in higher education, we must not de-professionalise academic work.