Balanced Scorecard for Education

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Balanced Scorecard is being actively used in non profit sectors, although initially this system has been developed for commercial organizations. How is BSC used in education area? Read on to learn more. Check additional information about balanced scorecard for education.

At a first glance it seems like there is no point in use of Balanced Scorecard in nonprofit organizations. Indeed, BSC was developed by Norton and Kaplan for commercial businesses. As known, the ultimate goal of every commercial organization is to make profits. Balance scorecard helps achieve this goal through setting of strategic goals and measuring company progress in this relation. As time went by, non profit, public, government and educational organizations found such experience rather interesting. Local governments and schools in Sweden were the first to start using Balanced Scorecard. As it turned out there are not many differences between commercial and noncommercial Balanced Scorecard. The key difference is that financial perspective in nonprofit Balanced Scorecard is not focused on making profits but on efficient use of available funds. Sure thing, scorecards in commercial and nonprofit sector can be hardly compared, although both types successfully function.

Balanced Scorecard in education is used to measure progress of a particular educational establishment on its path to strategic goals. What kind of goals can be in educational area? Improvement of education quality? Cost savings? Allocating more money for development and education of personnel? Yes, these are typical examples of effective strategic goals. As known, strategy works in the long term, and Balanced Scorecard is primarily used to measure progress in strategy implementation.

Balanced Scorecard traditionally consists of four categories: financial, customer, internal business processes, learning and growth. These categories may vary in non profit sector. At the same time, it is obvious who customers are. These are students, school sponsors, parent committee etc. The other perspectives can be easily applied in nonprofit educational area. Let's have a look at a few indicators that are widely used in educational BSC.

If we're talking about colleges and universities, employment rate is perhaps one of the most important indicators demonstrating quality and efficiency of education. If college graduates manage to find jobs within a year after graduation this is considered a good result. Moreover, it is possible to track number of graduates who manage to find jobs according to their majors. Obviously, the higher employment rate the higher the college ranking is.

Targeted students groups can also signal about efficiency and versatility of education. What kind of groups do we mean? Just anything you can imagine: athletes, minorities, ethnic groups etc. High number of students groups means freedom and possibility to express own personality in a college or university.

Student satisfaction also plays a major role. If a large number of students are not satisfied with curriculum and the way sciences are taught, they are unlikely to show their top performance. This decreases overall performance of the university and decreases chances of these students to get accepted to colleges.

Of course, there are dozens of indicators that are applied in colleges, universities, high and middle schools, according to their goals, organization structure and current problems. Balanced Scorecard becomes a very effective tool in school management. However, it needs mentioned that the entire school personnel or even students need to be involved in implementation of Balanced Scorecard.

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