What's the proxy for quality in your world?

Bucharest--Education is an industry with mostly indirect or proxy metrics for quality.  I know that some will point toward IB or SAT scores, university admission lists or other indicators, but these are still at best proxies for quality.  Many schools, especially those with a progressive pedagogical bent, resist singular or "hard" metrics, saying instead that quality is too subjective and individualized a concept to be captured (the "I know it when I see it" thing).

The problem is that the customers of private, independent education have their own often idiosyncratic proxies for quality in mind.  And these proxies may or may not be the same as yours.

Before you can get in front of the quality issue (i.e. define for your community what sort of things make for legitimate quality indicators), you have to know how they already understand the subject.  Re-framing what stands in for quality only works when you know the frame from which you are starting.