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There is ittle doubt that higher education is deep in a jam both fiscally and strategically. In my travels, higher education leaders seem to be waiting for something while also acknowledging that when the stimulus funds run out that something will turn ugly. Half of the states will have spent all of their stimulus money for education by the end of June 2010 and 40 states that will experience revenue shortfalls in the next year only compound the crisis. Something has to give in the next year and much more will give in 2012.
There are smart people in leadership positions in higher education that are trying to mitigate coming fiscal disasters, but most of their efforts lack the sweeping agenda that could pull higher education out of a tailspin. Sadly, most actions are directed at preserving the status quo. Most states have either postponed thinking about how public institutions must match these new fiscal and demographic realities or are hoping things turn around very quickly. Those states in the former camp are most likely to permit their public institutions to raise tuition to levels that clearly harm low-income students. Those who believe things will soon get better perpetuate ignorance of the long, slow slog that marks the erosion of public support for higher education, a descent that began two decades ago as states struggled to balance expenditures for prisons, highways, K through 12 education and Medicaid.
At this time of crisis should we strive to maintain the current structure of public higher education? Can we continue to assume that all institutions produce equally valuable outcomes for the state and its taxpayers, the effect of which is to cut or reward all institutions on an equal basis?
Woe to the state budget officer who may understand the value of higher education but is faced with the traditional approach of taking a meat axe after the very sector that could propel a state’s economy (and future tax collections). Higher education should lead states onto higher ground that includes expanded job growth, gains in intellectual capital, and some assurance of being able to compete in a global market place. If your head hurts thinking about this, you, too, might be attracted to making across the board cuts to all institutions while ignoring greater issues of worth and merit. But, in this age, I would argue that sameness only short-term strategy, at best.
To survive, higher education and those that make decisions about how higher education is funded need to view institutional performance differently. In addition to performance data, courage will be required. Disproportionate cuts to institutions are inevitable in my opinion and states can get ready for new realities by asking:
- Which institutions graduate the most students for the least cost?
- Which institutions prepare graduates to match which state workforce needs?
- What other metrics of worth beside the workforce agenda does the state want to reward?
- How much return to the state’s investment in higher education is truly found in athletic programs?
- In an age of expanded access to technology, is it necessary that all institutions offer all major degree fields? How many programs can be shared across institutional boundaries?
- Which institutions are tearing down boundaries to higher education and which are insisting that things shouldn’t change? Whose interests are being preserved with the latter argument?
- How can states best provide incentives for all institutions to increase their performance?
These are only opening questions. The funding of higher education reflects values and value-probing questions are always difficult and messy. But, the values that we’ve held since the 1990’s—values that have reduced state appropriations to higher education to less than 10% of institutional revenue in many cases—are the same values that now require us to make difficult choices. How do we want our systems to look and how do we want our institutions to perform? The easy way out is to let the current crisis blunt our best ideas about strategy. But is this what our grandchildren will admire about us?
Rick Voorhees is marking the end of the traditional fiscal year by returning to spectacular Glenwood Springs, Colorado, from an Achieiving the Dream coaching visit to the Ivy Tech Community College (system) in Indiana.
Semester-long classrooms everywhere are missing their students. Is the academic term too long? Are institutions missing big opportunities by being slaves to the traditional calendar? Are we numb to other possibilities to promote learning? To each question my response is “yes!” As my esteemed colleague Kay McClenney says, “…in higher education, for every problem we have a 15-week solution.”
I won’t go deep into the bureaucracy of how states fund their public institutions. Suffice to say the narrow focus is to standardizing the time required to offer a 3 credit-hour class to ensure that no institution short circuits the budget process. When the time that students occupy a classroom seat is made equal across the public sector, we can be sure that learning is equal, right? Well, no.
To catch up with the rest of the organized world, the US push is to help more students to complete degrees. We ought to use this opportunity to develop new pathways for them to demonstrate what they already know so that they don’t need to sit through classes that have been designed in ways that presume they don’t know much. Somehow, many traditional academics have convinced themselves that leapfrogging classes or sequences of classes can’t be done without great harm. We don’t know if this argument is based on harm to students or harm to the curriculum but most often it’s voiced as the former when it’s actually the latter. Accelerating learning can be done, however, and done with rigor, based on competency-based approaches. Too often, we’ve let the undergraduate curriculum become a fortress, and not the tool it should be by providing multiple entry and exit points designed to maximize student learning.
While traditional time-based measures are endemic across higher education their impact is most often felt in community college developmental education programs. Seventy percent or more of new community college students are referred to one or more remedial classes. Most of this group begins postsecondary careers needing three classes in developmental mathematics. It’s quite possible therefore—in the tyranny of a fifteen-week term—that they won’t see the inside of a “regular” college-level classroom until almost two years after they first touch an application blank. Small wonder the probability of these students graduating or transferring to a 4-year college is in the single digits.
Inertia exacts a price. As Kay and others point out, reorganizing developmental curriculum to more fully meet a range of learner needs is daunting work. While there are few guideposts, I’m convinced that much of the angst would evaporate if community colleges would understand and use competencies as units of learning. I’ve seen a handful of community colleges enjoy great success in decomposing the credit hour class into manageable competencies. One of the colleges I coach, Bossier Parish Community College, has had outstanding success in offering individualized pathways for students in developmental math based on mastering specific competencies. BPCC has increased student success rates by an amazing 30 percent in the lowest level of developmental math using competency-based approaches over the traditional fifteen-week approach.
There is a recent, resurgent interest in competencies as curricular building blocks. The Lumina Foundation on Education and its “Tuning USA” initiative is leading the way in facilitating competency-based models for select disciplines in Indiana, Minnesota and Utah. Several years back I edited a sourcebook with some very wise colleagues entitled, Measuring What Matters: Competency-Based Learning Models in Higher Education It was designed as a toolkit for faculty and administrators to understand the layout of the curriculum, to look for overlaps in competencies among courses, and to identify opportunities to accelerate learning. Jossey-Bass indicates that it’s sold well, but given where we’re at with our devotion to the traditional fifteen-week term since it was published, perhaps not well enough.
When the health care reform bill passed last week, few noticed the provisions for changing the way that federal government provides student loans. Riding on the health care bill was necessary since by its own rules Congress can only use reconciliation once per budget year and previous efforts to pass the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) had stalled since September 2009 in the Senate. With passage, the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program has ended and all student loans are shifted to the Federal Direct Loan program. So, who won and who lost?
The winners are institutions, students, and taxpayers. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that replacing new guarantees of student loans with direct lending would yield gross savings in federal direct (or mandatory) spending of about $87 billion over the 2010–2019 period. While one might argue that $87 billion is chump change, every dollar saved the federal treasury in our current economic crisis is critical. It’s estimated that the cost to taxpayers per $100 borrowed is 77 cents under direct lending and $5.25 under FFEL.
For institutions, SAFRA means efficiency savings from dealing with one source for predictable loan processing instead of an array of middlemen with their hands stretched fully out. The so-called marketplace idea behind FFEL was pockmarked by insider deals. Remember the scandals of 2007 when banks paid college student loan officers to work for the bank while they still worked at the college? Hmmm. There are those who claim that the private sector can do things more efficiently than government. I don’t think they had graft and bribery in mind.
Students also win by now having lower loan guarantee and origination fees, a single point of service for the life of their loan, and income-contingent repayment options. In an era when student loan indebtedness has skyrocketed, these benefits are tangible. Income-contingent repayment may help students choose careers such as teaching and social services where pay is low but where rewards to society are great. Plus, the New York Times reports that SAFRA directs $36 billion over 10 years to Pell grants for students from low-income families, money that wasn’t there before.
What’s not to like? The obvious losers are middlemen, chiefly large banks. According to the Associated Press, their profit under FFEL was $70 billion each year. Not bad for a business proposition in which the federal government guarantees all risk. The crony capitalism that marked the FFEL program was underlain with claims that competition among lenders kept the interest rates down for students, an entirely lame argument since the source of loan capital under FFEL and Direct Lending come from the same pool. Add up all the questionable ethics still on parade down on Wall Street and it’s difficult to muster much sympathy for those like Senator Lamar Alexander, also a former Education Secretary, who “termed the bill another Washington takeover.”
Alexander argues the bill “would deprive 15 million students – who voted with their feet and chose private instead of direct loans last year – of choosing among 2,000 lenders. Washington will throw out of work 31,000 Americans who now work for agencies helping students apply for loans.” I’m sympathetic to the latter argument–being jobless in an economy largely caused by toxic big bank practices is no picnic–but I’m not buying the first. It seems given a chance to streamline the application process, to have a predictable process for obtaining and repaying a loan, and income-contingent repayment is worth shutting out 2,000 lenders grazing for free at the public trough.
Excuse a rant today, but further evidence of dry rot in the higher education enterprise has wafted my way. A dear friend told me that while serving as a reviewer of applications for a prestigious (as in well-known) national award she was struck by a lack accumen in providing evidence of program success. One unnamed institution said they increased success by about 67%. All well and good, but that was a whopping 3 students to 5 students out of 100 served. Not good.
I’ve watched multi-million dollar and small-scale initiatives stumble more than once over what otherwise would be common sense. Figuring out how things work (or not) isn’t rocket science despite the theoretical posturing in the evaluation literature. As practitioners, we can’t ignore the fundamentals: what types of students change given what types of influences? If we can answer that, its easier to get to ways to increase the good we found. And, it all starts with conversations that occur before a project is implemented. Unfortunately, in my work, institutions want to move right to remedies without crossing the evaluation threshold. Dry rot.
Who tolerates this state of affairs? I doubt the straightjacket that is imposed on most graduate students in education about research rigor is always helpful for their future employers and students they serve. Few programs seem to care about preparing their graduates to make a case for the success or failure of a given program or project. A too-eager attachment to the so-called “scientific method” reduces most students to sort of zombie state (see my post below about Randomized Controls) and undercuts other valid evidence. The energy required to reach the “Gold Standard,” or assigning students to treatment and control groups, serves to fuzz up the context in which an intervention operates. As my colleague says, “not only do you need the results but you also need the context.”
Evaluate up!
Despite, or maybe because of, the rant above Rick Voorhees is enjoying the end of January in spectacular Glenwood Springs, Colorado, USA. He’ll celebrate Ground Hog Day in Charlotte at the Developmental Education Initiative and Achieving the Dream national meetings.
Independent consultants have the least time and resources to keep track of the mundane parts of their enterprise. Here, I refer to the process of keeping tabs on income and expenses in a way that makes tax filing easier each year. Several years ago, I developed an Excel sheet that matches the federal Schedule C categories which I’m sharing with my readers. Simply plug the expenses (and, hopefully, income) you have in the corresponding day and month (keeping receipts…I keep a folder for each month) and it self-calculates a monthly and yearly summary for you. Copy and paste this location in your browser:
www.voorheesgroup.org/Tax%20Log%202010%20for%20Distribution.xls
I’m not a tax expert nor am I offering financial advice. Rather, I’m providing this as a contribution to readers who would like to cut through the process of keeping things straight. If you think it would help you, email me [rick at voorheesgroup.org] and I’ll send you the password straightaway. Be well and happy consulting!
Rick Voorhees warming up in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, USA
I’m much encouraged by the post in Inside HIgherEd this morning on Indiana’s decision to be strategic in making budget cuts in higher education. Would that other states have this courage in hard times.
The usual approach is to treat all institutions “about” the same. That is, fund them all equally in good times and down times without any reference to how colleges and universities are helping states meet their goals. Of course, legislators are chief culprits in making sure that institutions in their bailiwicks don’t suffer disproportionately when times are hard. Its the old argument about whether higher education is an employment agency and local economic development arm or part of a larger vision that can move a state forward. In walks Indiana.
Indiana has decided to cut the budgets of some institutions because their per-student costs are higher and their completion rates are lower! Amazing. Inspiring. Trend setting for other states?
Now, if we could get institutions themselves thinking about their own programs and how they mesh with state strategy. In my consulting practice, I see this as a place most colleges and universities would like to go, at least in theory, but most find many internal roadblocks placed in their way. Few institutions understand what types of students are completing programs and going on to degrees.
Indiana’s challenge will be how to maintain a performance system after the federal stimulus dollars dry up. The political pressure must have been extreme to push this through in a down budget cycle. When things turn around, will it be business or usual? Or will we be celebrating the courage of the head of the Indiana Commission on Higher Education, Teresa Lubbers, herself a former Legislator, and Governor Daniels? Stay tuned.
Earlier this week, a new chapter of the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) was born in Dubai. More than 100 very smart folks representing 14 countries witnessed the birth of the Middle East North African AIR, or MENA as it’s now known. Why is this important? First, it’s been a dream by many throughout the region for many years as a way to elevate the importance of institutional research, i.e., the practice of using data to make decisions in higher education. A stellar group of professionals took this organization from conept to reality over the past year: Elizabeth Stanley (Zayed University), Jeanine L. Romano (American University of Sharjah), Maryam Aamir (United Arab Emirates University), Alicia Tartalo (American University in Dubai), Richard Miller (Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, UAE) and James Grasell,(Higher Colleges of Technology, UAE).
Another reason you might be interested in this story is that this region believes in the power of education and as one of places in the World where demand is steady, it’s a great laboratory for innovation. They also know how to put their money where their mouths are. As one attendee told me, “we operate very efficiently and are very cost-conscious. But, if it’s a really big idea and agreement is reached, the money appears.” My colleagues in the States should be so lucky. Big ideas and money are both in short supply in American higher education these days.
You might also note that despite the newness of western-style higher education in this ancient land, most of the MENA attendees were seasoned researchers. Their average years of service and education levels were higher than the average for all of AIR. Combine this savy with a willingness to share data across institutions and perhaps borders and watch what happens. As one of the four keynotes invited to participate in the birthing, I left in anticipation that with the horsepower available to this group, big things will happen.
My keynote dealt with using data in strategic planning (imagine that). You can download a pdf copy here.
Rick Voorhees is still in awe on a Saturday morning in Dubai, preparing for the University Quality Assurance International Board meeting.
The drum beat for more “scientific evaluation techniques” has become a mantra in higher education research. Despite clear and much more reasonable alternatives, external groups preach the need for randomized controls to determine if a given innovation “works.” These calls come from outside the institutions with whom I work, by otherwise well-intended experts who’ve been thoroughly indoctrinated in narrow research designs. Social Research Methods does a nice job of covering the evolution of the terms “experimental” and “quasi-experimental designs,” first coined by Stanley and Campbell.
The drumbeat has gotten louder and louder over the past decade for those seduced by the mandate to use control and treatment groups. The federal government during the Bush years was in the forefront for advocating for a “Scientifically Based Evaluation Methods” policy, sending the meek members of the education establishment into a scurry.
In it’s purest form, Scientifically Based Evaluation Methods calls for selecting randomized control groups (RCT’s). As the mantra reads, no true research in education can be conducted without RCT’s or some other variation of quasi-experimental design. Funders and foundations echo the need for comparison groups.
There are alternatives, however. Especially when RCT’s are preposterous, clumsy, and energy draining. Enter Michael Quinn Patton with some solid advice disputing the slavish attraction to RCT’s. While standards for research may be quite different from those used in evaluation (a dichotomy that I find only artificial, incidentally). But, we’re plagued in higher education by university researchers who insist that RCT’s are the only route to new knowledge.
Agreeably, Patton indicates that there are times when RCT’s are appropriate: drug studies, fertilizer and crop yield studies, and single health practices. The fertilizer reference, of course, brings me a broad chuckle. In my keynote as president of the Association for Institutional Research several years ago, I pointed out that treatment and control group methodologies were a call to “explain a multivariate world with a two variable model.” Six years later, I still think I’m right and am encouraged when Patton agrees.
Times when RCT’s are not appropriate include situations that are complex, multi-dimensional and highly context-specific. Patton uses community health interventions as an example; more broadly I use any intervention that seeks to change complex human behavior such as learning and skill interventions. My monograph late in the 1990’s sought to explain how complex and interrelated factors come together to predict student learning and cognitive development. Readers wanting a quick overview of how complex events might be related to produce a desired outcome can find a visual in my monograph.
So knowing that all of this is complex and there’s only a splinter that can be explained by RCT’s or quasi-experimental design, where does this leave all those gentle souls who merely want to prove that their programs work? Having to learn much more than the common mantra, I suspect. Patton talks about both the possible and appropriate, a good place to visit. Multiple sources of data about each case, triangulation of sources, modus operandi analysis, and epidemiological field are his keywords. To me, this all sounds a lot like context and generating meaning from each program’s reality rather than hammering on a RCT. Patton goes further, though, and offers that RCT’s aren’t needed when face validity is high, the observed changes are dramatic, and the link between treatment and outcome is direct. It seems that we agree that educators and evaluators frequently use RCT’s as a nail when the only tool they have is a hammer!
Now, there are times when RCT’s are appropriate. Most often, however, the assumptions they carry limit what can be learned about the intervention under scrutiny. In higher education, we assume that small, mirco-level programs can either assign students randomly to control and treatment groups or have the sophistication to scientifically match students in treatment and control groups. The former is virtually impossible from a moral as well as logistical perspective while the latter does violence to the complexity of an intervention. My experience working widely with programs throughout the United States has taught me that matching subjects on gender, age, and race/ethnicity neutralizes the effect of gender, age, and race/ethnicity have on an intervention. After that, as the song goes, “true differences” emerge. I don’t think so.
Does anyone besides me think that student outcomes depend more on other key factors such as the structure of the intervention, student motivation, and the quality of teaching? Does lack of a RCT mean that any other data gathered about that program is meaningless?
I’ve come lately to use the term developmental evaluation in my consulting practice to distinguish our approach from summative and formative evaluation. Most funders are interested in summative and formative evaluation while some are moving toward developmental approaches. The difference? Summative evaluations are for making final judgments and formative evaluations are directed at improving programs. Developmental evaluation, on the other hand, talks about ongoing development and knowledge building. The programs I work with aspire to be innovative and cutting-edge; they don’t have a long history from which to draw. They’re not ready for rigid summative judgments although they’re receptive to formative help. They are a work-in-progress.
Can’t beat Inside Higher Education for reporting on issues on the cusp of things that matter. Yesterday’s article by Jack Stripling describes how Carol Twigg’s work in course redesign and reducing undergraduate costs at the Center for Academic Transformation is playing out some ten years later. I’ve said for a long time that institutions and systems don’t understand their own costs, and this article bears that out and gives some reasons why. Remember, in higher education there’s great attraction to doing just about what we’ve always done even in the midst of a crippling economic downturn whose impact on institutions will only be felt next year when the federal stimulus money goes away. With catastrophe looming, I’m always eager to learn how innovation can pay its own way.
I’ve been a student of higher education costs–especially instructional cost–for a number of years and even more so lately as part of a team evaluating how states can increase the number of degrees awarded inside their borders. So, my while bias is always been: “what types of students change under what conditions”, the next question is, “by the way, what does that cost?” Of course, if you don’t know what the old way of doing business costs, you’ll never know the value of the new way. I’ve shaken my head many a time at the disconnect between being innovative and knowing–with actual cost data–that we’re dong great.
So, when colleges and universities implement Carol’s way of saving costs while increasing student learning outcomes some very interesting things appear to happen. Here’s several quotes from the article:
- “[interviewee] says his college no longer tracks the cost per student when conducting a new redesign, because he’s already demonstrated the model saves money. ‘I’m beyond the point of calculating cost anymore. I just know it works,’ he says. ‘I’m beyond the stage where I have to prove it to somebody, so I haven’t run the numbers on that [in more recent redesigns].’ Takeaway: Getting over the first hump and squelching critics is critical. Thereafter inertia to document cost savings blends into the budget landscape.
- “No department head would ever willingly give resources back to the dean, and no dean would ever willingly give resources back to the provost,” [an Interviewee] says. “That’s a core structural feature of American higher education, it truly is. And what Carol’s program does is expose that.” My takeaway: to be truly transformational, all levels of an institution need to discipline themselves to allow those who make the savings keep the savings. I’ve seen many bandit budget schemes and robbing from the innovative to pay the light bill is simply poor management.
- “[An institution] illustrates that course redesign can lead to unexpected innovation, the campus is yet another example,” [interviewee] says, that higher education won’t get serious about reducing cost without “external pressure.” Takeaway: Innovation trumps bookkeeping at the faculty level. This is as it should be…faculty innovate, administrators administrate. Yet, the imperative to make both happen has never been greater in my four decade experience in higher education.
If you’ve been watching all of this unfold in your institution or your state you might agree that: 1) only pockets within institutions (and public systems) understand their own instructional costs; 2) academics are naturally loathe to say that they’ve saved dollars…it gets sucked up (inappropriately, in my opinion) by other parts of the institution; and 3) the best location for productivity and innovation is academic departments and among individual faculty. However, they don’t confuse improvement in student learning with ongoing calculation of cost savings.
So, what would make innovation and cost come together? Could states help institutions bridge this gap? States certainly could play a huge role in policy and policy development, especially in helping pockets of innovation within institutions grow and thrive. But, they either don’t have or haven’t used instructional data to drive a coherent agenda (it’s actually much more of the former than the latter). Ironically, the data needed to address this issue from the broad perspective of a state–cost savings at the micro or departmental level–remain just beyond reach. Why? Because it’s not the most important thing that academics do. But, then, nobody thinks to ask.
(Rick Voorhees enjoying a Saturday evening deep in the Rockies while Denver shovels snow!)
One advantage in a too busy professional life is that interesting work comes spiraling my way with increased frequency. I spent most of last week at Stellenbosch University in South Africa after having spent several days the week before near the Kruger National Park looking at the Big 5 (Africa’s lions, leopards, rhinos, hippos, and cape buffalo…pictures available here. Prior to the too-indulgent photo safari in the Timbavati, I also joined my colleagues at the South African Institutional Research Association at Port Elisabeth where I was an invited keynote (it’s a Prezi, a non-linear alternative to PowerPoint but because it’s web-based, you don’t need any software to view it).
At Stellenbosch, two very bright South African higher education pacesetters, Lynda Murray and Pieter Vermeulen, joined with me in an evaluation the university’s institutional research and planning function. These evaluations inevitably end up more wider in scope than a simple focus on institutional research, however. It’s hard to keep an evaluation of an institution’s use of information inside a tight box, without commenting on the bigger world inside the university and outside. Stellenbosch was no different.
To say that South Africa’s higher education (tertiary) sector has undergone a major transformation since Reconciliation in 1994 could qualify as an all-time understatement. The post-apartheid era has caused institutions to rethink not just diversity but their approaches to the World in the 21st century. Earlier this year the education ministry was split into two parts with higher education joining training to cover private and public institutions. The scope of this re-constituted ministry function includes universities, colleges, and the skills development sectors, which include the Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETA’s) and the National Skills Authority and the National Skills Fund. Much more united and certainly ambitious than the American arrangement for higher education where fragmented policy is a fact of life.
Why talk about national changes? Stellenbosch is one of the oldest universities on the continent and has been a traditional leader in South African higher education. What Stellenbosch tries, many will emulate. To ask an external panel to review its use of data and information is tribute to evolving leadership and a willingness to ask hard questions. I’m not going to give you the details of what we found since that’s up to the University and its able institutional research and planning leader, Dr. Jan Botha, to distribute those details. I can say, though, that Stellenbosch has committed to furthering its leadership journey in South African higher education by using its data strategically and to rethinking its approach to strategic planning.
Certain truths fall out of any planning situation. I’ve been fortunate to work with some very bright minds in this business, especially Byron and Kay McClenney at the University of Texas, who are constantly pushing institutions to use their own data to create better opportunities for students to succeed. With their help and the scar tissue that any good consultant accumulates, I’ve steadily been adding to my list of critical elements to gauge institutional planning that I sometimes title–with tongue firmly in cheek–“Rick’s Rubrics.” I’ll share these here. If you’re curious about how they played out at Stellenbosch or in South Africa, drop Jan an email.
• If you’re not planning, you’re planning to fail. Many institutions have glossy strategic plans but fail to operationalize them by explaining exactly who is doing what, how large its commitment (staff and dollar resources), and how it will know whether it all works.
• Planning, unfortunately, oftentimes becomes a defensive activity. Many institutions proliferate unit planning to keep things “about the way they’ve always been” and there’s always the tendency to create a plan to satisfy an external audience, knowing that it means very little inside the institution’s own walls.
• Perfect data don’t exist. Most institutions won’t cross this threshold. Fear of failure punctuates this stance as does some general ignorance about what data is on hand and what can be created.
• Thin to Win. Who wants to read a long plan. Thick plans are a fodder for doorstops, usually. On the other hand, plans without a clear announcement to specific activities to bring about goals aren’t worth cost of paper. There’s a balance here and precision wins the day over the ponderous.
• It’s not enough for planning to be participatory; it also had to be decisive. Committees don’t carry out plans, but the wisdom of those who will carry out the plan is fundamental. Another balancing act, but let’s error on the side of making decisions not keeping all parties feeling good.
• Select 3 (maybe 4) “main things” that make a real difference. This is Byron’s critical lesson for me and others. Not atypically, I once evaluated an institution (not Stellenbosch) with 39 priorities. I asked how in the wide world, they could handle 39 priorities the response was that “we meet and talk about them.” I rest my case!
• Don’t expect a home run every time. Definitely an “Americanism” and forgive me the sports analogy, but I’ve also seen institutions grow quite tired of planning simply because the results aren’t visible, say, in six months or even a year. Planning is a journey, not an episode.
• Be flexible ready to adjust strategies and goals. Most institutions develop a strategic plan and never adjust it to fit emerging realities and new intelligence. A periodic review once a year is advisable, prior to setting new action priorities for the next year is advisable.
• Show results widely (even if ugly). Dirty news seldom survives at most institutions, unfortunately. A courageous institution uses ugly data to calibrate changes needed to address new priorities. Audiences sometimes hear from me that dirty data does not make you a bad person! I hope you see both the humor and the imperative.
• Link clearly to resources. A plan without a clear tie to human and dollar resources is not a plan, it’s a public relations piece. Over last decade I’ve seen accrediting agencies awake to institutions with gloss without substance. A good thing.
• Most critically: separate the operational from the strategic. Most institutional managers get hung up here by thinking that their day-to-day activities are strategic when, in fact, they are usually operational (but quite excellent, as I’ve found). I always get back to doing three (or no more than four) things very well. Most institutions would do well to define what they mean by “operational excellence” before they pursue strategic goals that are tipping points for the future.
Rick Voorhees (home in the US after two thrilling and professionally satisfying weeks in South Africa).
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