The purpose of this Consultation Paper is to seek your comments, feedback, and advice on a HEQCO-led project to develop a set of performance indicators to monitor, evaluate, and improve Ontario’s public postsecondary system.
For clarity, this project is designed to allow HEQCO to better fulfill its legislated mandate to provide an evaluation of the overall state of Ontario’s postsecondary system. This project is not designed to evaluate the performance of, or rank, individual institutions. As such, this project is not related to any data collection exercise HEQCO may be asked to initiate by the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities in light of its recently-announced consultation process around transformation of Ontario’s postsecondary sector.
The thinking offered in this paper is based upon advice and guidance we have already received from a diverse group of experts in the fields of higher education, performance measurement, and policy analysis, as well as research we have conducted examining performance measurement exercises in other jurisdictions.
This paper provides the context for the Performance Indicators for the Public Postsecondary System in Ontario project, herein known as the Performance Indicators Project and our preliminary thinking on a slate of indicators to assess Ontario’s postsecondary system. The first section of this paper (page 2) outlines the purpose of this project, the guiding principles, and proposed timelines we used to frame the initial discussion. The second section (page 4) summarizes many of the points that were made during our preliminary conversations with our group of experts (see Appendix 1), and gives a sense of the discussions and debates that led to this draft list of indicators. The third section (page 10) lists the draft set of indicators that resulted from those discussions.
There are several ways to provide your input. You can send written submissions to us via email at: Indicators@heqco.ca (please use HEQCO Performance Indicators Project as the subject line) or regular mail at: HEQCO Performance Indicators Project, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 2402, Toronto, ON M5E 1E5. We would appreciate your feedback by August 31, 2012.
We thank you in advance for your contribution to this important project.
Sincerely,
Harvey P. Weingarten
President & CEO