AMERICA, UNITED STATES, Quantity and quality both key in an era of cutbacks

Even with data suggesting a nascent, if uncertain, recovery, the Great Recession of 2008 continues to reverberate across the globe. The tertiary public and non-profit sectors’ primary revenue sources have been eroding in many countries.

Decades of tuition increases have been met with increasing resistance from students and their sponsors. With tax and corporate earnings languishing, government support and private giving have lost their predictability.

Forbes and Moody’s recent dire warnings amplify the increasing chorus of commentators’ assessments that the higher education industry’s bubble is nearing the bursting point.
Responding to lower revenue, institutions have closed programmes, reduced faculty and staff ranks, increased class sizes, deferred maintenance and contrived other economies.

These, of course, have drawn immediate accusations that academic quality will be diminished. In turn, these allegations quickly draw a familiar counter – we must do more with less. Neither the allegation nor the self-affirming rejoinder merit confidence. With a complacent sense of entitlement, many tertiary institutions and self-serving quality guardians have sidestepped two economic realities.

One, the cost of doing business predictably increases. The cost of salaries, utilities, supplies, insurance and so on relentlessly rises with regularity. Two, higher education tends to be a labour-intensive enterprise. Unlike many other industries, tertiary education has not enjoyed sufficient gains in productivity to offset the increasing cost of doing business.

In sum, institutions, with the approbation of self-serving quality guardians, failed to control their operating costs. Rather they have relied on annual tuition and enrolment increases coupled with government appropriations and philanthropic largesse to cope with ever-increasing costs of doing business and lagging productivity.

By ignoring these realities, our institutions have for decades sought to do more with more.

Doing more with less?

The new era of unpredictable revenue has forced major changes in budget priorities. Doing more with less is a laudable, albeit naïve, aspiration. In the tertiary context, more has too often been simplistically defined as the numbers of students served, with little or no regard for the quality of the product.

I suggest that, as a minimum, to qualify as doing more with less the output should be defined in terms of both quantity and quality. An increase in output volume is not necessarily accompanied by a comparable measure of quality in the product or service.

Producing more of an inferior product is doing less with less. Hence, in the absence of clear metrics the quality critics have a superficially superior argument.

In relation to the Great Recession of 2008, higher education’s typical response to lower revenues has been to close programmes, and employ fewer faculty either by consolidation or technology replacement, with an unqualified expectation that if desired quantity is achieved it will miraculously be accompanied by no decrease in quality.

Unfortunately, little or no attention is given to defining the resulting quality of the truncated educational services provided. What are the consequences if we accept that promoting student learning should be the primary function of the majority of tertiary institutions?

A more defensible strategy should be defined as at least the same or a larger volume of output with no decrease in the quality of the value-added learning.

Merging sections of a course may result in fewer faculty and classrooms required to service at least the same number of students. The catchphrase of doing more with less is superficially fulfilled. Focusing solely on the ratio of resources employed and the number of students served is shortsighted. The exhortation is met but only superficially.

A fundamental question remains: does the reconfigured learning experience produce at least the same quality of value-added learning? I suggest that serving more students without regard to the quality of the resulting value-added learning is a deceptive disservice to students. It gives credence to the critics’ claims of quality decline.

More and less of what?

Further, one could legitimately ask more and less of what? If the 'more' is the same or a higher level of student learning, how will it be measured and to what standard?

Just doing more with less could have at least a few possible manifestations worth noting.

More could simply mean increasing institutional enrolment or average class size while holding faculty numbers and other resources constant. These two tactics have been popular, with little said about the impact on (ill-defined) learning or behavioural goals.

Similarly, the familiar calls to increase retention rates and-or reduce the time to graduation are easily quantified. They are not necessarily compatible without validation of the resulting impact on value added. Coupled with validated student learning, however measured, they could easily result in very different and not always desirable outcomes.

One suspects that employing fewer resources in all too many cases actually results in less. This gives a patina of credence to critics who question resource cuts with anecdotal arguments for quality.

Without clear, predetermined standards neither institutions nor critics can credibly speak.

Reactive resource shrinkage will not automatically lead to higher productivity if both the quantity and quality of the product – student learning – are measures of success.

Institutions claiming to do more with less and their quality critics alike would be wise to consider both the quantity and quality of the desired outcomes before they act or respond.