The Tyranny of Metrics

by Jerry Z. Muller

Reward for measured performance in higher education is touted by its boosters as making universities “more like a business.” But businesses have a built-in restraint on devoting too much time and money to measurement—at some point, it cuts into profits. Ironically, since universities and other nonprofit institutions have no such bottom line, government or accrediting agencies or the university’s administrative leadership can extend metrics endlessly.25 The effect is to increase costs or to divert spending from the doers to the administrators—which usually suits the latter just fine. It is hard to find a university where the ratio of administrators to professors and of administrators to students has not risen astronomically in recent decades.