Quality Matters at Penn State

On October 9, Terrell Jones moderated a panel of student and staff who discussed the factors that contribute to or deter a student from being successful. A summary of the discussion is on the OPIA website and was announced in the October newsletter.

This is the first of three Quality Advocates sessions focused on student success to be offered this semester. The second session will be November 13 and will be moderated by Damon Sims. In this first session,many issues and concerns were raised by the panelists and there wasn't time for questions.It might be worth extending the discussion to the blog. So once you read the write up, let us know your thoughts about how you would define student success, what you consider the policies and practices that facilitate or hinder student success and what advice you would give a student who asked you what it takes to succeed at Penn State.     

Some of the key concepts in Lean come form Toyota's identification of the seven wastes: overproduction, waiting, transportation, processing, excess inventory, unnecessary movement, and defects or spoilage (with an eighth of unused employee creativity added later by some authors). In our internal discussions at OPIA we have thought that 'waste' can be

Mike's review of the recently published book, Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Public Universities gives an overview of the book's most interesting findings, Some of them reinforce what research from our office found several years ago: lower-income students are less likely to complete college, even after controlling for a number of other characteristics.

The Department of Education (DOE) is streamlining the form used by millions of college student who apply for financial aid each year (http://www.ed.gov/finaid/info/apply/simplification.html) Their efforts have some of the hallmarks we use in continuous quality improvement to make processes more efficient and effective.

One of the first steps in improving any process is to map the steps in the process and then look for areas of duplication, redundancy, and waiting. In redesigning the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form, DOE may also be looking to the Internal Revenue Service to potentially provide information from tax forms. DOE estimates that 90 percent of financial aid applicants provide information to 20 questions that is readily available through tax forms. That's a lot of duplication. . . .