Are colleges really businesses?

By JOHN M. CRISP

SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE

A few years ago, a former president of the college where I work bought multiple copies of the book “Good to Great,” distributed them to upper-level administrators and a few faculty members and staged an all-day retreat at a local hotel meeting room to discuss the book. A nice box lunch was served.

In “Good to Great,” management consultant Jim Collins reports on his extensive research into the practices of a number of companies in various industries. All of them were “good” companies, but some of them found a way to transform themselves into “great” companies, and Collins is interested in distinguishing the characteristics of the “great” companies that made the difference.

He found that great companies are blessed with a rare form of leadership that combines professional will and personal humility. Great companies find ways to retain only the best employees and place them in the right positions — Collins calls this getting the right people “on the bus.” Then great companies focus in an extremely disciplined way on a single concept that reflects what the company is best at and most passionate about, as well as what drives its economic engine. Collins calls this the “hedgehog concept.”

I find Collins’ research reasonably convincing; these practices really do seem to work in the business world. But how well do principles like these apply to the non-business sector?

This is a relevant question for colleges and universities.

Since our society has considerable faith in business, in recent years institutions of higher education have been pressured to behave more like businesses, rather than following a traditional academic model. “Accountability” is an important buzzword in state legislatures, and college presidents have become “CEOs.” Efficiency receives increasing emphasis and “frills” are being eliminated.

And a few years ago, the Texas legislature consigned tuition rates to the wisdom of the marketplace. (Incidentally, tuition skyrocketed.)

Students or ‘products’?

In the interest of efficiency, students are urged to move from one end of the academic assembly line to the other as quickly as possible. And it’s not at all unusual to hear them referred to as “products.”

Even though Collins’ book is about business and for the most part directed toward businesses, in a 2005 monograph intended as a supplement to “Good to Great,” he speculates that 30 percent to 50 percent of his readers are from the non-business sector. The monograph is titled “Good to Great and the Social Sectors,” which include higher education, charities, foundations, churches, hospitals, police departments and so on.

His subtitle is telling: “Why Business Thinking is Not the Answer.”

His point is that the practices he describes can lead to “greatness” in any organization, but many business principles themselves do not translate well into the social sector. After all, he says, most businesses range somewhere between mediocre to merely good, anyway. Our unquestioning faith in the business approach is largely misguided and the effort to apply bottom-line business principles to all organizations is a mistake.

While institutions of higher education may have some characteristics of businesses, in other ways they are so different that they defy comparison.

For both business and higher education, the input is money. For business, the output is also money, and only money. For higher education, the output is more mysterious. Some of it can be quantified, which is one reason legislatures tend to focus on graduation rates, class sizes and time required for degree completion.

But the real output of higher education is much harder to quantify.

I was thinking about this last week as I met for the first time with my freshman composition students at the beginning of our spring semester. Some are recent high-school graduates, some already have careers, some have been to Iraq and show the effects, some are academically unprepared and some are brilliant. Some are eager and some are already bored.

By semester’s end, some will have passed, some will fail and some will drop out. But the very last thing this four-month excursion into thinking, reading and writing will resemble is a factory that produces a “product” with an economic value as easily assessable as money.

X John M. Crisp teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas.