Outputs

Proposition: on matters humans, if work outcomes actually matter then they can be measured. 

Alternatively, on matters human, if work outcomes can be meaningfully measured then they matter (to someone).

If accepted as a proposition, this means that if you’re having troubles measuring work outcomes then the matter doesn’t matter much.

A nice example is the current Innovation push by the federal government. 

This minorly expensive program has no meaningful measures such as increases in high tech exports.

The only measures will be the number of individuals and organisations funded, together with the number of marketable activities that they report back to the government. 

These will be things such as conferences attended, papers written, meetings attended, etc.

These activities are inputs and not outputs.

So the initial proposition needs to include the concept of meaningful measures that are outputs and not inputs.

The same can be said for tertiary education. 

I would argue that the market place is the best measure of educational outcomes.

So the quality of your graduates can be measured by these metrics:

1. Firstly, the fraction of graduates that get a job in their discipline, and

2. Their average starting salaries compared to graduates from other institutions that also get a job in their chosen discipline, and

3. Some metric associated with the rise of these graduates in the industries that hires within the chosen discipline.

For each of the three metrics, I would normalise them to unity (the first is a fraction so that’s easy) and then multiply all three of them.

That’d sort the turkeys from the pigeons. And it’d also stop universities overtraining in dead disciplines.