A Rough Set Based Total Quality Management Approach in Higher Education - Complex System Modelling and Control Through Intelligent Soft Computations - page 384

Keywords Rough set theory Total quality management Core Higher

education Education institutes

1 Introduction

Over the last several decades the term has evolved as an

obsession with business and non business entities for achieving the goals of sus-
tainable pro

' quality management '

ts, competitiveness and long term survival. It is equally gaining
attention from educational sector companies, universities, colleges and government
agencies of education sector. The genesis of quality management has its roots in
manufactured product, productive process and can be traced to the work of
Shewhart in the 1930s (Shewhart 1931 ). Many years later after the World War II
Deming, Juran, Feigenbaum and others formulated quality based management
techniques which inherited the Shewhart s philosophy of quality but extended it

into business applications across many organizations. Total Quality Management
(TQM) increasingly used as an effective business strategy to capture wider market
share and gaining competitive edge (Rehder and Ralston 1984 ; Fortuna 1990 ;
Fisher 1993 ; Ruben 1995 ). TQM is not only a tool, which is ready to use, but there
are number of principles and methods, which needs to be applied according to
organizational needs. There are some early evidences of adoption of TQM in USA
higher education system in the non academic areas such as administration and
support functions (Ruben 1995 ; Koch and Fisher 1998 ; Yorke 1999 ) whereas
application of TQM in core academic areas remains debatable and very selective
(Vazzana et al. 2000 ). This is largely because TQM is essentially evolved in
manufacturing based industries and switching it to extensively human speci

'

c
higher education sector pauses incompatibility issues (Houston and Studman 2001 ).
All over the world Higher Education in general and technical education in
particular transforming its focus from (Weeks

2000 ) and therefore, developing market orientation like other business organiza-
tions. Higher educational institutions with traditional ways of working are

' elite oriented ' to ' mass oriented '

finding it

increasingly dif cult to cope with the pressure of change. This is more so in

developing and under developing countries where public funding for higher edu-
cation is limited and national objective of increasing higher education enrollment
may not be achieved without private funding. This brings into focus the utility of
TQM into higher education sector with the business like goals of reducing operating
costs; increasing fees based revenue, improving student ' s satisfaction, employ-

ability and faculty retention (Zabadi 2013 ).
Successful Implementation of TQM to improve academic content delivery and
overall functioning of higher education institution continues to be a daunting task
for the reasons spelled out earlier. This chapter aims to improve TQM utility in
professional higher education sector by introducing Rough Set Theory (RST) based
approach. RST of (Pawlak 1982 , 1991 ) was developed as an alternative data
analysis tool but subsequently made inroads into the areas of Arti

cial Intelligence,