What Would be Required to Initiate Change?
Reforming higher education will not be an easy task. For centuries higher education has been seen as a so-called “monastic” retreat where researchers and scholars created a space immune from the daily pressures of commerce and politics within which they could study and provide “objective” commentary on beliefs, ideas, and social practice. And to support their position, they rigorously institutionalized the practice of training and accreditation, appointment, and tenure to ensure their belief systems and practices would survive the centuries. Moreover, they ensured that practice would extend itself by taking on more and more students, who, though they might not enter the practice, had families who would pay well so their child and heirs might become educated. In due course, democratic reforms and public funding would cause the practice to extend beyond the elite to the public at large, though elite institutions would always differentiate their place and offerings from the masses. But in all reality, not much has changed.
It is for this reason that, if change is to occur, the culture – its belief system, its attitude, and its practice – must change. But institutions, like people, are not open to change. A recent study by Deloitte found that “60 to 70 percent of all large-scale change efforts fail.” The reason? “In most cases, it’s not strategy, process or system flaws that get in the way of success. It’s the human factors — a combination of our natural resistance to change, our tendency to feel overwhelmed by change and the internal politics we all struggle with — that prevent most change efforts from succeeding.”2
Programmatically, How Might Change Look?
Understanding what changes need to be made within higher education from an administrative and not theoretical or ideological perspective requires a person understand the difference between the “practice” of education versus the “business” of education.
Understanding the “Practice” of Education versus the “Business” of Education
The practice of education involves the activities that happen between a faculty member and his or her students in the classroom; the business of education involves the activities that happen between the board, administrators, and staff involving present operations and creating financial stability and security moving forward.
Both are critically important to the success of any institution, and neither one nor the other should take precedence. As such, it is imperative that both these parts come together in benefit of the institution at large. Otherwise, working separately and/or at odds with one another will certainly doom the institution – a strict adherence to a particular manner or mode of teaching may make the institution irrelevant to contemporary student demand, whereas an overemphasis on personal preferences promoting specific administrative agendas may contribute to administrative bloat the costs of which will cause teaching to cease as the institution closes.
Know Your Customer: They are changing, and their numbers are decreasing
The first thing that needs to change is that colleges and universities must understand their customer. Colleges and universities have long known the ever-increasing supply of college age students, who were children of the baby boom generation, was coming to an end and that an impeding “cliff” of ever declining students would require increased competition among institutions for that decreasing pool.
Institutions were also aware that with each generational change, the students brought with them different values and attitudes, needs and desires that required different products and services – regardless of whether the institution
chose to respond or not to such. Moreover, as early as 2015, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) had identified – in what has
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