Two very topical and interesting articles caught my eye today:
What Colleges Should Learn from Newspapers’ Decline
Some very interesting points and interesting discussions associated with both posts. Are these issues unique to the US? I don’t think so. Carey asserts that “there is still time for universities to use technology to their advantage”.
To my mind that means BI and Data Warehousing will play a more significant role into the future of Australian and international higher education. Its not just about plotting load and income and calculating attrition and retention. Its about performance analytics, democratisation of data, smart and agile leadership and the shared value culture that Google CEO talks about. That’s where the differentiation will be.
In 1997 the legendary management consultant Peter Drucker said, “Thirty years from now, the big university campuses will be relics. … Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable.” Twelve years later, universities are bursting with customers, bigger, and (until recently) richer than ever before.
But the number of organizations that can — and are doing it online — is getting bigger every year. According to the Sloan Consortium, nearly 20 percent of college students — some 3.9 million people — took an online course in 2007, and their numbers are growing by hundreds of thousands each year. The University of Phoenix enrolls over 200,000 students per year.
Perhaps the higher-education fuse is 25 years long, perhaps 40. But it ends someday, in our lifetimes. There’s still time for higher-education institutions to use technology to their advantage, to move to a more-sustainable cost structure, and to win customers with a combination of superior service and reasonable price.If they don’t, then someday, sooner than we think, we’re going to be reading about the demise of once-great universities — not in the newspaper, but in whatever comes next.
