Quality assurance in American college's information management focus on Common Data Set

Abstract

Japanese universities are in competitive environment and need to distribute their information to public, especially high school students and their parents. American universities had a similar experience ten years ago. In the twentieth century, some universities missed or cheated about own information, which was used by college guide books. This problem caused disappointment and criticism from the public. While these issues, some people related higher education on inside and outside, administrators, faculty, staffs, college guide publishers and others, they made Common Data Set (CDS) to this problem. CDS is a set of standards and definitions of data items that mainly used by guidebook publishers for collecting institution's information. This paper looks at the process of consensus development of Common Data Set and suggests to quality assurance in the context of Japanese universities.