Measurement Plan for Higher Learning

I decided to review Michigan State University due to the size of the institution. I find that sometimes these larger institutions will try to rest on the reputation of prior years instead of pushing to greater things.

The first item that needs to be looked at is the mission of the university. Without this we don't know what we need to measure or where we want to go. The following is an excerpt from the mission statement:

As a public, research-intensive, land-grant university funded in part by the state of Michigan, our mission is to advance knowledge and transform lives by:

• providing outstanding undergraduate, graduate, and professional education to promising, qualified students in order to prepare them to contribute fully to society as globally engaged citizen leaders

• conducting research of the highest caliber that seeks to answer questions and create solutions in order to expand human understanding and make a positive difference, both locally and globally

• advancing outreach, engagement, and economic development activities that are innovative, research-driven, and lead to a better quality of life for individuals and communities, at home and around the world

 When identifying the audiences that are important we need to look foremost at the students, past, present, and future. Those audiences will determine everything that MSU is. If the past students fail or all become disenfranchised it will become difficult to recruit new students. If current students leave, you have no legacy. If future students decide to go elsewhere there is no reason to have a school.

Other audiences such as staff, parents, and the media all have additional stakes in the process as well but in a lesser role.

The objective will be to connect with the mission to as many students as possible. By making a connection to the students that the university is focused on research and philanthropy they can recruit the and guide students to be better people.

The initial benchmark will be to compare news coverage of current achievements of MSU students both past and present.

To determine a measurement tool I went to Google News and did some searches for MSU related topics. The thought is that MSU is a prominent institution and that they will likely be covered by larger news agencies that are included in the Google News section.

In my research for this to get an idea of their success I filtered through pages of results from Google News and was a little disappointed  in the coverage. I realize this is sports season, but it took a page and a half to find the first non sports related article. While the one article I did find outside of sports seemed on target to the mission of the school. It was focused on a study performed at MSU. The second article I found was unrelated to the school directly but was about a students living conditions off campus.

If feel that while the sports coverage is good for MSU (as long as they are winning) since it gives a sense of pride to all students, the administration needs to focus on getting more publicity for the achievements of the school.