Abstract
Institutional change includes the supplanting of the old model of production with a new one, the elimination of old markets and the emergence of new ones. As higher education around the world shifts from national markets to an integrated transnational market, and possibly toward a virtual market, Christian higher education, like other market sectors, will have the opportunity to redefine its market niche. Emerging opportunities linked to new institutional rules will challenge higher education in ways that may not yet be obvious to its present managers and faculties. How the university in its portfolio of options might negotiate the elimination of old markets and the creation of new markets is the subject of this essay. A general set of principles and recommendations is offered.
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Notes
We want to thank our reviewers for clarifying comments, a couple which are addressed in the introduction.
Our epistemological approach to this project is non-technical, theoretic, and in the rich tradition of F.A. Hayek and others. Relying primarily on deductive analysis, our method here emphasizes the interrelated principles of internal consistency and logical coherence. If theory meets these criteria, there can be no logical objection raised against it. Of course, meeting this initial standard of evaluation does not yet validate the plausibility of theory. Plausibility would require the additional and higher epistemic burden of truth-correspondence; that there exists within the articulation an adequately warranted set of cause and effect relationships, in this case corroborated between certain economic, educational, and informational mechanisms and actual phenomena taking place within social reality.
Western Governors University is a multi-state collaborative offered by 19 Western US states, housing degree programs in education, business, health services like nursing, and information technology. Its nationally accredited Teachers College alone enrolls 6,000 from 50 US states with a self-reported 30% annual growth rate. There is a similar approach with the University of Illinois’ global campus initiative. It claims: “In order for The Global Campus to provide the highest quality education to our students, we are committed to hiring the highest quality instructors. Our instructors are not only subject matter experts, but they also are educated in areas of online pedagogy and facilitation. They must be committed to a philosophy of life-long learning and participate in a variety of mentoring and instructor development opportunities. Along with subject matter expertise, we are also looking for instructors who have experience in online education and accelerated education programs, as well as an understanding of adult learning theories as they relate to the online environment.” (https://employ.global.uillinois.edu).
One way to evaluate the legitimacy of such claims is to know in what degree students’ are supported financially by the university and how much tuition debt is transferred to the individual student in the obtaining of further education. Some universities are saddling students with thousands of dollars of student loan debt.
‘Institutions’ are the formal and informal rules and conventions that govern the process of collective action, production and exchange. Douglass North (1990, p. 3) said they are “the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction.” Indeed, we regard institutions as integral features of the productive base of the economy; they form the capital assets of society and function to guide the allocation of scarce resources. As Samuel Bowles (2006), p. 48) phrased it, “Institutions influence who meets whom, to do what tasks, with what possible courses of action, and with what consequences of actions jointly taken.” For purposes of this article, we distinguish the term institution from the term organization. See North’s comment to Hodgson: “[O]rganizations…are special institutions…but for my purposes organizations are to be separated out from institutions” in Geoffrey Hodgson (2006, p 19).
The president of Phoenix has said he wants it to enroll 500,000 students by 2010 Selingo 2005.
It is argued by many practitioners of education that so-called ‘best practices’ ought to be codified by the State or a quasi-state entity in order to achieve professional status. This may be a mistake. Dunne and Hogan (2004, p. xxi) persuasively argue that practice may effectively be located not in the temporal moment of a political trend (as a state is prone to do), rather in the historical character of practices that emphasize “the progressive elaboration of their goods and ends within authoritative traditions of activity and argument. Neither their historical character nor the highly specific nature of each one of them detracts from the normativity of practices, from the binding claims they make on their respective practitioners. Nor does this normativity imply any closure on development; to the contrary, the standards that are internal to each practice, supporting its claims, are themselves subject to redefinition within traditions that are both ongoing and self-correcting…[It] see practices as sites where individuals, just by becoming competent practitioners, learn to [protect specific domains of engagement and inquiry from subversion by external ends that would instrumentalise them] in cooperatively serving the ends of the practice, thereby acquiring, not only technical accomplishments, but virtues. Practices thus offer the most robust resistance we have to an emotivist culture dominated by unaccountable aestheticism and deeply manipulative modes of management and therapeutic expertise.”
The expanding institution of education (or any expanding institution) divides information in order to control for the effects of scale, scarcities and span of control. In order to mitigate risk and uncertainty the information pattern of education is favoring Rawls’ practice rules in order to lower production costs. Local, individual discretion is being traded off for a tighter assessment regime.
We realize that Catholic universities are a product of the first transnational market developed during the Middle Ages, where, following the establishment of the universities at Paris and Bologna, Papal charters were granted for the spread of higher learning in the Catholic traditions, proceeding into the twentieth century. This history and its institutional analysis will be taken up on another occasion.
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Loomis, S., Rodriguez, J. Institutional change and higher education. High Educ 58, 475–489 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-009-9206-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-009-9206-0