Value creation and related measurement in universities. An empirical application

Abstract

The growing normative, financial, organizational and didactic autonomy, which has interested European universities, has stimulated the monitoring processes on efficiency, efficacy, and operational methods with which public resources are managed. Moreover, the association between financial funds, along with sustained costs and service quality, has strongly increased top management's attention to costs reduction and, above all, to the final user's satisfaction. In this new scenario, evaluation comes out to be the natural consequence of the strong universities' autonomist pressure. Therefore, this paper, after approaching universities' structural and systemic assets, as well as their relationship with the referring contest, analyses specific (related to the formative offer) and global university's performances measurement methods and evaluation difficulties. The exposed theoretical analyses are completed with an empirical application about an engineering degree course self-assessment.

Keywords:

• Universities
• evaluation
• assessment
• service quality

Acknowledgement

Although both authors share responsibility for the entire work, Sections; Didactic offer value creation, The empirical application of servqual to an engineering course, the Conclusions and Appendix A may be attributed to Francesco Polese, whereas the Introduction, Section; University's structural and systemic aspects and Integrated activities' monitoring methodologies to Giulia Monetta.

Notes

1. The dynamics of social and economical, private and public, organizations can be analysed by the Vital Systemic Approach (ASV), through the conditioning processes brought by relevant over-systems, see Beer (1985). ASV has recently been studied in the enterprises' management disciplines, and takes root in the general theory on vital systems by Golinelli (2000a; 2000b; 2002).

2. According to ASV, relevant over-systems affect the intrinsic vitality of an organization, for the use of primary and critical resources; the relationship is therefore, of mutual interest, because the organization receives resources, and offers benefits, in terms of satisfaction of legitimate over-systems' expectations (Golinelli, 2000a). This consideration leads toward the recognition of the student body as one of the major over-systems of a university apparatus, considering the economical resources given and for the didactic benefits expected.