Total quality management in California public higher education Available to Purchase

This paper investigates the extent of Total Quality Management (TQM) implementation in two California public higher education systems: the California State University (CSU) and the University of California (UC) systems. These two higher education systems include 32 statewide campuses with over half a million students and 27,000 faculty. A questionnaire was sent to all campuses in both the CSU and UC systems. Issues such as TQM implementation and the benefits and challenges of such implementation are surveyed, discussed and analyzed. This study reveals that more than half of the California public universities are implementing TQM in one form or another and the TQM implementation in the CSU system is much wider than that in the UC system. In general, the character of implementation is still limited to business‐type operations in universities, such as business finance and administrative services.