Look. The leading edge is upon us. More small liberal arts colleges are closing each year. With Marylhurst’s abrupt closure this year, the shift to medium-sized colleges is coming sooner than I expected.

Universities are in dire straights because their organizational structure is built on soft reality while the results of their labors must be compatible with hard reality. It’s a group of people who act as if money isn’t real, who have built their whole enterprise around “go to college and get a better job” in which money is very real.

Some people get it.

When you think about how we’ve tried to solve the cost problem in higher ed, on the academic side it’s been kind of a one-note solution: bringing in more and more lower-cost labor, in the form of adjuncts. Full-time faculty have become so diluted across more sections, more courses, more curriculum, that we really are not well positioned to take care of core mission, student success, etc. The big money, ultimately, is in how much curriculum are we offering, to whom, and how.

This sounds a lot like how fiat currency devalued money, and how fiat food devalued nutrition. Fiat education ruins learning. Long term, it doesn’t work to invest in low-quality fluff when your enterprise depends on exacting, high-quality production.

We have to be able to connect core operations — teaching and learning — back to the business model. We’ve done a disservice by pretending those are two separate things. Do I make or lose money on various programs? Most institutions — the overwhelming majority — have zero idea how they earn a living, where the margins are across programs.

Because the university model is run on a “guild” system, disciplines are largely left alone to tend to themselves. I’m dealing with this at my own job right now, that the university has been more concerned that departments have certain systems in place than it is with the data collected with those systems. The faculty’s insistence for autonomy has created these giant financial structures where the head of things doesn’t actually know what happens to the money. Coupled with the fact that faculty usually aren’t that interested in money (they are the types to budget the same $3 into 3 different categories) and are more loyal to their discipline than their university, there is very little incentive for departments to keep themselves running shipshape.

Small soapbox moment: usually departments have people–administrative staff–who are adept at analyzing and deploying budgets. However, because staff are widely disregarded as functional, intelligent entities, departments do not adequately utilize their talents in a way that would make the most fiscal sense for the department.

(Trust me on this. If you do not have a PhD, your opinion is disregarded, no matter how much experience you have in fiscal, technological, or people-centered matters.)

Speaking of which,

We did a project recently for a large research university, and we were presenting the data analysis to the faculty. We put up a slide that showed one course with 12 sections. When you looked at the sections, one had 25 students, one had three, another had five, another had 10. It was really eye-opening for the faculty see that. Same course, different sections, and we have this huge variance.

There is a lot of stuff like this that could be examined in the university. This is someone who is feeling extremely underutilized in her role talking, but you could squeeze greater efficiency from someone like me by putting me on a project like that (I’ve done it before it’s on my resume hello), OR by abolishing my position and hiring someone for half my salary to do basic office work. Either one, you would win.

In the university, much of the analysis is done at a medium level. It completely ignores the impacts of decisions made by the top leadership, and assumes that all of the on-the-ground decisions made by departments are made in good faith with good fiscal sense.

None of those things are good to ignore. Starting to look into them creates a huge kerfuffle about “academic freedom.”

So you get the types of university presidents who either spend indiscriminately and are beloved by all, and then the ones who are hired to clean up the mess and whom everybody kinda hates.

That is not a recipe for growth and success. That is a recipe for driving out all of your good people and inviting narcissism and disaster.

Anyway, read the whole interview. It’s worth it.