quality assurance standards based on real-world results
Quality Outcomes Standards Are Critical to Our Labor Market
Employers, policymakers, and investors need a way to select education and training providers that align with their workforce and labor needs, as well as direct job seekers toward new opportunities.
While no system can perfectly capture every dimension of an education provider's or training program's quality, our standards will allow institutions to report outcomes relevant to the customers—the learners who pay to attend and the employers who hire them.
To that end, the EQOS Quality Assurance Standards and related assessments capture near and medium-term outcomes according to the following metrics:
five key metrics of student success
Learning
Completion
Completion
Acquiring knowledge and skills is perhaps the most important feature of any consideration of quality. Learning quantifies and categorizes the skills and competencies within a program and assesses whether graduates have met industry and/or self-identified benchmarks by the end of instruction.
Completion
Completion
Completion
Rates of completion provide a useful measure of how individual learners fare within a given program. This metric logs the rate at which enrolled students successfully finish their program.
Placement
Completion
Placement
Students often cite obtaining jobs, career advancement, or continuing higher education as key reasons for pursuing postsecondary education. Placement measures whether a program graduate has obtained a new job, advanced in title and/or salary with an existing employer, or generated a new or increased income through self-employment.
Earnings
Satisfaction
Placement
Financial rewards and economic mobility provide key measures of value for students in postsecondary education. Earnings measure the average wage or salary of participants before and after their program.
Satisfaction
Satisfaction
Satisfaction
While harder to quantify, student satisfaction is an essential component of quality evaluation. Satisfaction assesses the program's success from the student's perspective through survey questions focused on instructor quality, program content, and level of support.