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Culture of Quality
- The foundation of the Culture of Quality is a commitment to improving the University through a better understanding of what our customers – our students – need and expect. We do this is by allowing them to participate, along with the faculty and staff, in planning and evaluation activities that are an integral part of the way Northwest is run.
- Northwest's unique “Culture of Quality,” a nationally recognized planning and management system, has led to Northwest's inclusion in a study by the American Association of State Colleges profiling schools with extraordinarily high rates of student success.
- Quality is the ratio of perceptions over expectations, and the expectations we work hardest to meet are those of our students as they relate to life goals and academic success.
- Quality is not a leadership-driven initiative. If quality principles are forced on people, it flies in the face of everything you are trying to accomplish, which is continuous improvement in the achievement of desirable outcomes.
- Northwest empowers its students, faculty and staff to make decisions in ways that promote institutional agility and effectiveness while eliminating red tape. This systematic approach to decision-making is the key to running a quality-based organization. Institutions that fail to measure and evaluate what they do create systems that can’t be managed, and units within the organization soon begin to operate with varying levels of success and failure.
- Northwest started its quality journey in 1984, some time before many of the current catchphrases like “total quality management” and “continuous process improvement” were even invented. There were no awards then, and no trendy corporate fads. The only goal was to make Northwest a better institution by putting students first.
- We have used quality principles to create a number of groundbreaking programs:
- It is because we focus on customers first that Northwest was able to develop the American Dream Grant, which provides tuition, room, board, books and the use of a computer to lower-income students through the first two years of college.
- Culture of Quality planning also makes it possible for the University to employ approximately 1,000 students in responsible campus jobs that provide meaningful work experience prior to graduation.
- Because of these efforts and many other efforts Northwest received the Missouri Quality Award In 1997, 2001 and 2005.