Change What You Measure to Catalyze Change

4%. 5%. 6%.

Those are the undergraduate acceptance rates of Stanford, Harvard and Princeton, respectively.

Stanford admits about 2,300 students per year, but it could easily accept multiples of that without sacrificing the quality of its student body. And with an endowment of $28.9 billion there’s no practical reason it couldn’t admit many, many more students each year.

No reason, that is, except for the value universities place on that coveted low acceptance rate.

Universities obsess over acceptance rates, elevating it as a key proxy of the institution’s impact and worth. Low acceptance rates become a marker for (perceived) quality. These lead to higher rankings which feed into a self-fulfilling flywheel of elitism.

But there’s no natural law that says that the goal of a university should be to reject as many as students as possible. There’s no universal truth that says a 12% acceptance rate results in magically-better educational outcomes than 15%.

While nearly every single university has been measuring its success with the same metrics and same approach, one university has decided to measure itself completely differently. One university has zigged when others zagged and completely flipped its metrics to make change happen.

Arizona State University has declared it wants to be “measured not by whom we exclude, but rather by whom we include and how they succeed,” making a compelling case that “excellence and access are not mutually exclusive.”

By changing what it measures, ASU has oriented the institution to make change for itself, for its students, and for the state of Arizona.

What measures took the place of the industry-standard figure of low acceptance rates? Here are a few of ASU’s key goal metrics:

• Maintain the fundamental principle of accessibility to all students qualified to study at a research university.

• Maintain university accessibility to match Arizona’s socioeconomic diversity, with undifferentiated outcomes for success.

• Improve freshmen persistence to greater than 90 percent.

• Enhance university graduation rate to 85 percent and more than 32,000 graduates .

• Enhance quality while reducing the cost of a degree.

• Enroll 100,000 online and distance-education degree seeking students.

By changing what it measures, the university has set itself up to be a changemaker institution. ASU didn’t accept the status quo measures for university success. Instead, it invented its own, in line with its values and vision.

Every industry, and most organizations have adopted metrics — like low admission rates among universities — which might be standard. But wide-adoption doesn’t necessarily mean they serve the organization or its community properly, nor that it obviously leads to desired outcomes. What we measure matters. And as the case study of ASU shows , changing our metrics is a powerful way to catalyze change.

Can you find the courage to change what you measure to unlock the changes you want to create?

From “Idea to Action”

Reflection questions:

• What are you measuring right now to define your success?

• Why did you choose those metrics?

• Who else uses those same metrics?

• What changes might become possible if you changed those metrics?