CMMI for educational institutions

We all know that Education constitutes one of the important foundations of any society. There are various levels of teaching institutes from the Ivy League to ordinary colleges. This gradation is a very informal and there are no formal mechanisms to classify (assess) and improve the standards in an institution. There are bodies like Washington Accord (International Engineering Alliance, www.washingtonaccord.org) which consists of six international agreements governing mutual recognition of engineering qualifications and professional competence. There are other National bodies like NBA (National Board of Accreditation - India) set up in September 1994, for the purpose of assessment of Quality and Accreditation of Technical programmes in India. But these bodies are more like certification agencies. What we want to propose in this paper is an assessment and improvement framework for all Professional institutions like the CMMI for SW industry. In fact we propose to use the same levels, with appropriate process areas, relevant specific and common goals, work products etc. We propose to produce a complete, consistent framework along with the needed software which will be useful for any academic institution to assess themselves where they are and produce a roadmap (project plan) to go to the subsequent levels. We used some of these processes during our preparation for NBA accreditation.