Universities Are Not Degree Factories
2 July 2005
A number of business leaders are on the public record in recent
years for criticising the university sector as being not as
efficient as private business.
A new piece of research contradicts that view and suggests that
the sector is relatively efficient and that productivity growth was
superior to most sectors of the economy.
The topic of not-for-profit universities being compared with
factories, which one university administrator did in 'Four Corners'
on Monday is not unrelated.
Such comparisons are fraught with difficulties, simplistic and
unhelpful in that they confuse two very different worlds. Whilst
universities have to operate more like businesses, they are not a
business with a defined product, and a profit-driven bottom line,
whose outputs can be measured precisely like a car factory.
Quite apart from universities being 'not-for-profit', how do you
measure the outcomes of teaching, commitment, research achievements
years after course completion, the value-adding of graduates to the
breadth of the nation's economy? The difficulties of identifying
real measures of performance and efficiency usually mean the
reversion to fairly crude measures like, staff-student ratios,
status, graduate employment, all of which have an unclear link with
'efficiency and productivity'.
Universities are principally about people, developing their
intellectual and personal repertoires, so that they can live more
fulfilling lives and contribute to the development of societies.
Not an easily measured area.
Yet the authors of the research paper claim that despite
profound changes in the university sector across the last fifteen
years, with the period ahead clearly going to be one of even
greater change, universities have successfully manoeuvred these
troubled times.
Productivity growth, difficult though it is to measure, was
superior to that of most other sectors of the economy in 1996 to
2000.
The researchers concede that their research methodology needs
further development, the results are not definitive, and that care
has to be exercised when interpreting the results. But that is true
for all research.
The real importance of the study is that it goes beyond the
simple comparisons with business, and begins to analyse more
technically how the performance within distinctive institutions
like universities can actually be more accurately evaluated for
particular circumstances.
The authors comment, for example, that in their model you would
not expect a large university of 40,000 students to be compared
directly with a university of 5000 students. Benchmarking for
efficiency is best done with similar universities. It is,
therefore, a cautionary remark about the usefulness of 'league
tables' or 'hierarchies of universities' which have been the
subject of considerable speculation recently.
Universities at their best are not factories. The view that
education institutions are factories had some currency in Victorian
times, but a hundred years of progress should by now have laid to
rest that comparison.
What I know of USC indicates clearly that students gain from a
strongly supportive and personal environment, in an education
process that does not remotely resemble the Four Corners 'factory',
even though some universities in some campuses may have gone down
that mass production route.
Professor Paul Thomas is Vice-Chancellor of University of
the Sunshine Coast