The crisis in higher education: 8. Thinking outside the box

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Overview

I have argued that public higher education institutions can no longer depend on ever increasing revenues for survival. In an era of mass higher education, they need to focus on reducing the cost, to students, parents and government, if they are not only to win back the support of their key stakeholders, but indeed if they are to survive.

I have looked at a number of areas where there is plenty of scope for doing this, including

• moving to activity-based accounting so that the true cost of a program can be calculated, including overheads, and using this to drive down costs;
• using modern, evidence based course design to improve the effectiveness of teaching, through greater use of technologies, including AI, and better learning design, with a deliberate focus on better learning outcomes at lower cost;
• instructors focusing more on the progression of core skills throughout a whole program than on delivering content, which students can find, analyse and apply themselves;
• reducing the total time across a system spent by tenured faculty on research by up to 30%;
• eliminating most adjunct faculty in universities, and reducing (over time) the number of tenured research faculty within a system, to be replaced with more full-time tenured teaching professors trained in effective teaching methods;
• joint course development and sharing across institutions, especially in foundational courses;
• mandatory use of open textbooks and other open educational resources (such as educational videos) rather than commercial products that students must buy;
• reducing the time to qualification.

All these need to be done without reducing standards, and working in close harmony with all stakeholders, including unions.

Of course, if any of this was easy, it would have been done by now. None of these approaches is a solution on its own, and there are probably other, more pragmatic solutions available for reducing costs. However, my suggestions are likely to be more effective in reducing costs and maintaining standards than the traditional ways of reducing costs to balance budgets: across the board cuts; increasing part-time contract teaching staff; closing ‘expensive’ (but often important) programs.

This means thinking outside the box, and there are some key barriers to this, most which are well known but they need repeating.

Barriers to change

1. Weak institutional leadership

This is often a problem, although I believe it is too easy to blame the senior management. It’s a tough job these days. One Provost (a former British historian) told me that his job was like King John’s of Britain, fighting off the robber barons (the Deans) who were all trying to grab extra resources, leaving no time for long-term strategy.

The constant churn in senior management is another problem. With constant turnover in senior positions, long-term strategising is impossible, with each new senior manager with their own agenda. Getting costs down needs to be a core strategy that lasts more than three years, the average life of a university administration these days. Also, a lack of expertise in managing large organisations and a lack of financial expertise are other limitations in tackling the challenge of making an institution more cost-effective.

2. Faculty and union resistance

However, getting costs down is not just the responsibility of senior management. It needs a complete institutional commitment, and that includes, above all, faculty commitment, and lowering costs is not seen as being in their best interests. Several senior administrators have pointed out in particular that collective agreements provide a major block to financial reform, since they limit discussions about work-load, research time and other factors that impinge heavily on institutional costs. With shrinking budgets, senior managers feel that there are no financial sweeteners they can offer to persuade unions to be more flexible.

However, unions and faculty are facing an increasingly challenging choice: either change or die. Once the institution starts closing programs, staff will be laid off. This is not a new problem for the union movement. In other industries, unions have seen which way the winds of change were blowing, and have tacked strategically to accommodate change. This needs to happen in higher education. Better to have less research time but a permanent job teaching, with a pension, than no job at all. Better to spend the same amount of time working partly from home and partly on campus than to have no job unless it’s 12 hours a week in a classroom.

3. Government indifference

Governments could do a great deal more to encourage change in public institutions. Just reducing or limiting institutional funding and doing nothing else is not helpful.

In the 1990s, the provincial government of British Columbia over two years with-held 3% of institutional operating grants for innovation in teaching. At UBC this came to almost $2 million in operating grant. UBC put together a comprehensive proposal for using technology for teaching, and received the full $2 million. Out of this funding grew the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, the first learning management system (WebCT) and the first online degree programs. Similar incentives could be used to facilitate the transition to a lower cost institution.

Thinking outside the box

Perhaps the biggest challenge though is to think differently about the provision of higher education. Is everything that we do really necessary? What could we do differently? Could we give up doing some things without losing too much, to save other more important things? Could we try something less expensive and see if it works? Will such daring be punished or rewarded, even if it fails? The alternative to thinking outside the box is a painful and not so slow death, literally by a thousand cuts.

I don’t envy anyone working in a higher education institution these days. It’s easy for me to say all this, now retired with a comfortable pension. But if I can’t say it, who will? Change has to come in higher education, and come quickly. The system is beginning to buckle.

Over to you

1. Do you think that HE is becoming too expensive and needs to focus more on cost reduction? 
2. Do you think it is possible to reduce costs without reducing standards or quality?
3. Where do you think economies could be made without lowering standards?
4. Which of the eight strategies for lowering costs do you most disagree with and why?
5. What alternative ways of funding HE institutions should be tried/increased (higher tuition fees, better student grants, increased government funding. ….)?
6. Are the barriers I’ve listed insurmountable? If not, where do you see possible change?
7. Is your country/jurisdiction different in terms of the cost of HE? In what way?

Please use the comment box at the end of this post, to answer any of these questions or to add other comments.

Up next

I will be returning to my memoirs. The next post will focus on my experience working as a consultant first at the Universidad de Guadalajara in Mexico, then the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. I will use this to make comparisons between working in North America, Mexico and Spain.