Page 373 - Crisis in Higher Education

Appendix B • 343

6. Potential employers work with tenured and professional faculty to
set curriculum content and performance standards so graduates
learn more and are prepared for the job market.
7. Student-centered learning, which is designed to satisfy individual
learning styles, makes it easier and faster to learn so quality, gradua-
tion rate, completion time, and job placement improve.
8. Universities must reconfigure the strategic plan and the strategic
planning process. This means:
a. Recognizing there are multiple customers and goals—students
want good jobs and less debt; governments and potential employ-
ers want lower costs and better quality graduates.
b. Increasing faculty involvement in managing universities and the
strategic planning process.
9. Universities must decentralize decision making so their individual
colleges have more freedom to pursue innovative and entrepreneur-
ial activities, appoint more faculty to administrative posts, and cre-
ate a faculty resource committee (FRC) to given faculty input on
resource planning and allocation.
10. Change organizational structure, lower costs, and enhance quality
through mergers, closing branch campuses, and, most importantly,
by outsourcing activities.
11. To improve quality and efficiency, all types of faculty must be edu-
cated in content, pedagogy, and assessment of learning. Evaluation
of teaching performance by students and peers who are master
teachers, access to resources, teaching seminars, and other mecha-
nisms are essential.
12. It is important to identify the capabilities of different faculty types,
know the instructional needs for courses, and match the two factors
to get both high quality and low cost.
13. Faculty unions are not the cause of the problems that universities
face but are the result of these problems. University leaders and ten-
ured and professional faculty must mend the relationships that have
created the underlying problems and driven faculty to unionize.
14. Universities must create high-tech reading materials that are interac-
tive and help students identify and address knowledge gaps. These
should lower cost, provide better content coverage, enhance learning
for students, and offer better outcomes for publishers.
15. Universities must create high-tech, digitized lectures and video
vignettes that allow students to have access to top tenured and