Productivity

Productivity is one of the most basic measures of economic activity. Comparative productivity figures are used to judge the degree to which resources are efficiently used, standards of living are changed, and wealth is created.^[4] Productivity is the ratio of what is produced to the resources required to produce it, or the ratio of economic outputs to economic inputs:

Productivity = Outputs/Inputs

Outputs can be any goods, services, or financial outcomes; inputs are the labor, services, materials, and capital costs incurred in creating the output. If outputs increase faster than inputs, productivity increases. Conversely, if inputs increase faster than outputs, productivity falls. Technological innovation has historically been one of the chief engines of productivity gain.^[5]

Useful indicators of productivity require that both inputs and outputs be clearly defined and measured with little ambiguity. Moreover, the process for turning inputs into outputs must be clearly understood. And those processes must be susceptible to management if productivity increases are to be secured. Finally, meaningful quality changes in outputs need to be conceptually neutralized in measuring changes in productivity.

One need only list these conditions for measuring and managing productivity to understand how problematic they are as applied to higher education.^[6] To be sure, some of the least meaningful outputs of higher education can be measured, such as the number of credit hours taught or degrees granted. But the outputs that actively prompt people to pursue education-enhanced knowledge, aesthetic cultivation, leadership ability, economic advantage, and the like-are decidedly difficult to measure. And while we know a great deal about effective teaching, the best of classroom inputs remains more an art in the hands of master teachers than a process readily duplicated from person to person. Not surprisingly, we commonly believe that few teaching practices can be consciously managed to increase productivity and are deeply suspicious of calls to do so.

Outside the classroom and seminar, ideas of productivity have greater acceptance. Productive research programs are a condition of promotion and tenure at research universities; and while scholars express uneasiness about counting research productivity, it certainly happens. The ability to generate research dollars and the number of articles and books written undeniably count, along with the in-

tellectual merit of the work. There is little dispute that many other higher education activities are appropriately judged by productivity standards. Some support services, such as the financial management of endowment resources, are subject to systematic and intense productivity analysis. Other academic support activities, including the provision of library services, are expected to be efficient and productive, even where few actual measures of their productivity are taken.^[7]

In many cases, discussion of productivity in higher education touches highly sensitive nerves.^[8] Faculty, for instance, commonly complain that administration is bloated and unproductive. Concern for the productivity of higher education informs a significant range of the community's journalistic writing and its scholarship.^[9] This sensitivity reflects both the truly problematic application of productivity measures to much that happens in education and the tension between concerns about productivity and quality. But it also reflects the fact that we are "unable and, on many campuses, unwilling to answer the hard questions about student learning and educational costs" that a mature teaching enterprise is inescapably responsible for answering.^[10]