Page 92 - Crisis in Higher Education

66 • Crisis in Higher Education

is not for them. They can choose to work hard or not, which impacts their
grades, the quality of their education, and the jobs for which they may
qualify. In addition, students decide for which companies they may work,
where they would be willing to live, and the level of compensation they
would like. Certainly, the organizations that offer the jobs have something
to say about the conditions of employment. This becomes a negotiation
with the graduate.
A better way to look at higher education and its relationship with cus-
tomers is as a matchmaker, who provides applicants with opportunities
to learn and prepare for life. The university mediates the relationships
between students and their potential employers using a set of experts
(tenured faculty) who work together and pool their resources to cre-
ate the appropriate outcome (graduates who are in demand). A key and
sometimes forgotten part is that universities should have a responsibility
to ensure that educational pathways lead to good jobs.
It is important to recognize that colleges and universities are profes-
sional service organizations (PSOs), which are complex and difficult to
manage and rely on the knowledge and expertise of their highly trained
2
and educated “servers” to deliver high-quality outputs. In universities the
servers are tenured faculty from a wide variety of disciplines, who must
work together to design and deliver programs and curricula, packaged as
courses that meet graduation requirements. The implication of this real-
ity is that tenured faculty must have a significant role in directing and
governing universities because PSOs rely heavily on these highly educated
servers. Examples of other PSOs would be hospitals, law partnerships, and
engineering design firms.
In PSOs and even in some manufacturing firms, service-dominant logic
(SDL) has emerged as an important way to create value for customers. SDL
contends that value is co-created in interactions among customers (students
and organizations that hire graduates), employees of the firm (faculty), and
even suppliers (textbook publishers) rather than in a traditional supply
chain with a long-linked sequence of two-party interactions. The rapid
3
exchange of information among the participants facilitates faster and more
effective learning that is tailored to the needs of students and organizations
that hire graduates. PSOs and SDL are discussed more fully as the solution
is developed. What is important for now is an understanding that relation-
ships with customers are different in higher education.
In addition to a different perspective offered by PSOs and SDL, third
parties complicate the “who is the customer” question by paying a large