editorially speaking Change The winds of change are everywhere in education. They are especially obvious in higher education where societal of unfulfiiled prome ~ ~ e c i a t i o u s ~ h aled v eto ises. The imperative for change in the educational system is a tangled mixture of societal and political forces. A deep recession has reduced public funding for higher education, engendering a need to seek alternative revenue sources and reducing the availability of discretionary funds. The nation's changing demographics have been accompanied by a diverse, steadily growing population of older, parttime students seeking a college education more explicitly for its vocational value than for a grounding in the liberal arts and sciences. Colleees and universities are being asked to provide increased social and academic services to students with diffrrent Iwrninr styles and backerounds. many of whom are less acade&caily prepared and have limited financial resources. The burgeoning education market is creating consumers that expect immediate, tangible returns for their time spent in school. The information explosion and the development of new technologies are threatening higher education's traditional monopoly over the delivery and selection of information. The rapid emergence of new fields and sub-specialties has further fragmented the traditional structure of higher education. Concern about rising costs in higher education is giving rise to more government regulation, greater doubt about research, and further criticism of faculty accountability. Increasingly, the commentary about change is cast in the language of the market place, that is, in terms of a consumer-supplier (student-educational system) relationship. Contrarian views aside, the market place metaphor seems to have gained the center stage. Educational institutions are urged to engage i i ~entrepreneurship, that is, to seekout nekmarketo&ortumties, to diversify, to restructure, and to reposition themselves in order to respond to the mounting financial pressures. At all levels of higher education, from junior faculty through the highest administrator, it has become increasingly apparent that the previously relatively stable flow of resources to education is dwindling and their sources are changing. Private institutions are finding it difficult to maintain their endowments a t the levels necessarv to suoport their historically successful activities. public insti&tions are unable to maintain their activities with state resources. Student fees are increasingly used to replace funds formerly supplied by state legislatures. Private
-
funds, in some cases as much as 60% of the total budget, are being solicited to augment state appropriations, and .- . overhead allowances from research grants are being by stretched to cover more items that used to be supplied .. state funds. The business m e t a ~ h o rof students as consumers and faculty as suppliers m i y be useful to attempt to outline the current problems of higher education and to define possible solutions, but there is a danger in slipping too easily into a complete acce~tanceof all of the details it imolies. Higher edication is not simply another business in which the customer is always right. Those who seek the "products" of higher education, whether they be students, prospective employers, or even state governments, often cannot clearly articulate their expectations of educational institutions. Have those in educational circles most responsible made the effort to define explicitly what the system of higher education is about? Have they been lax in focusing attention on what the educational system can do and, equally important, what it cannot do? Or have they reallv "fought the eood fight" and simolv been overwhel&ed bysocietalUdeman&? Students ('aid their families) must understand that the facultv are resoonsible for defining the terms of an undergraduate education, and that students should exoect to invest substantiallv their own time and energy in;ts acquisition. This kind of relationship, of course, assumes that the faculty have indeed thought about defining the terms of an undergraduate education a t their institutions. Clearly in manv cases facultv have not made the appropriate effort. The pressures for change are real. However, care must be taken not to accept too quickly the implications of the current business metaphor regarding possible solutions to our problems. There are examples of technically "well run businesses" that fail because those involved did not make the effort to define carefully the human relationships between the perceived needs of the customer and the ibility of the supplier to meet those needs. Are the customer needs items that the educational system cnn or fwls it should supply? Or, is the supplier-higher rducstion-just scckine to exoand the focus of the 11uiine.i.;in order to keeo it going? There is more to education than vocationalism and consumerism. It's time to begin trying to define it.
-
JJL
Volume 71
Number 2 February 1994
91
