In the context of the discipline of quality control, this paper identifies many of the tools which may reinvigorate the statistical and graphical toolkits in higher education. Certain statistical and graphical issues are discussed by means of examples and hypothetical situations, and techniques are introduced that have application for the pursuit of total quality management and that draw upon confirmatory and exploratory data analysis. First, the paper considers the cause and effect diagram as a graphical technique for developing approaches to the subsequent gathering of data with respect to a given effect or outcome. Next the Pareto diagram, a tool for prioritizing or otherwise seeing the magnitude of various causes affecting an outcome is examined. A discussion of control charts follows naturally from a consideration of statistical thinking and the importance of understanding variation in the processes that provide opportunities for change. The concept of statistical control is introduced to aid in the handling of special-causes, common-causes and the subsequent system change. A later section briefly explores how some of these techniques may be applied to current university concerns such as student retention, application flow and yield and faculty allocation. The paper contains 6 graphs and 16 references. (JB)