What Does LSE Mean?
I just received an email from the London School of Economics asking me to donate, as a loyal alumni, so that they can devote funds to “innovation”. The university of the future seems to be the objective of this innovation.
What on earth is this?
What about higher education needs innovating?
Why the imperative?
I understand that higher education productivity measured in business terms is, to be blunt, weak. And I understand that more modern techniques as enabled by digital technologies will, no doubt, disintermediate education and make the classic class/lecture room setting look antiquated. But what are the consequences?
For universities.
For students.
For teachers.
Is this just another step along the relentless path of commercialization, whereby everything, no matter what its content, is measured by business metrics and made amenable to business school solutions?
The history of modern growth has been the history of a search for efficiency. This is not the same thing as innovation. It is not invention. It is not learning or discovery of new knowledge. It is the translation of existing things – processes – into new terms to reduce the cost of that process.
I call this reduction a compression of “operating space”.
To me all processes consume both physical and logical spaces. They consist of a series of steps logically contrived, and often physically delineated, to accumulate towards a final product or service. Each step consumes resources. It therefore has a cost. Part of that cost is the energy and physical resource used along the way. Another part is the intellectual effort in designing the steps. A third is the management cost of overseeing and conceiving the process. Obviously there are other costs. Compressing this operating space reduces the cost, often through the elimination of steps made redundant or duplicative, or by substituting one method for another.
In any case the goal of reducing operating space is to release resources either to end users – consumers – or to resource owners so that they can re-deploy their resources to alternative processes.
Why?
Because all processes represent an intermediate step between consumers and their direct access to resources.
In an industrial or post-industrial economy, with it complex division of labor and even more complex division of knowledge, some form of intermediation is essential. Market purists deny this existence of process. They still talk in antiquated terms of macro and micro economic activity, whereas much, if not most, activity now exists within the operating space of mediation that some people refer to as a “meso” layer.
A university is a form of operating space. It is a series of steps that make education available to large numbers of students simultaneously. It is a method of standard enforcement. It is a locus of a variety of activities that loosely relate to the actual supply and demand: students coming into contact with knowledgeable teachers. Every aspect of that operating space and those steps could be subject to elimination or change in method.
Let’s make this real. I read yesterday a story about a Duke student in which the following paragraph contains costs within Duke’s operating space. Set aside the fact that the student in question performs in porn movies to pay her way through school, and simply focus on the costs:
“Officials at my school responded that $60,000 [student cost for attendance] is a bargain — they actually spend $90,000 a year on each student. Let’s break that $90,000 down. Building and maintaining physical infrastructure on campus gets $8,000. Another $14,000 goes to pay a share of administrative and academic support salaries, which in Duke’s case includes more than $1 million in total compensation to the university president, Richard Brodhead, and more than $500,000 to the provost, Peter Lange, according to 2011 tax filings. Also, $14,000 goes to dorms, food, and health services; $7,000 goes to staff salaries for deans and faculty; and miscellaneous costs take up another $5,000.”
So only $7,000 of the total $90,000 cost claimed by Duke is actual teaching expense – salaries and so on to faculty. The rest is consumed by the delivery method. Big physical spaces, extensive logical spaces, and a slew of management costs. Not all this could be eliminated. But it ought to be a target. Reduction in operating space ought to free up resources that flow to students in the form of lower costs.
Do student’s really need a $500,00 a year provost? Really? Or a $1 million a year president?
With a $240,000 investment [i.e. four years at $60,000 a year] a student is entitled to know what return she is getting. This is the consequence of commercialization. It is not acceptable to use pre-commercial language in a response. If universities want, as they apparently do, to become commercial to attract investment – donations is the old word for such inflow of funds – then they need to be clear about what product they are producing.
Some of that reduction in operating space could end hop as a reallocation of resources to teachers. But I imagine there will be an offset. Fewer teachers each earning more because their individual productivity will have risen.
Such is the march of commercialization.
It is the story of our modern era.
Ever greater productivity due to the compression of old operating spaces, coupled with a redirection of resources towards the construction of new processes to deliver new services or products each housed in a new operating space.
The question we have to ask is whether this constant cycle of innovation followed by a search for efficiency in order to free resources for alternative uses is one appropriate for higher education. Or should education be somehow immune to it? And if we think it ought to be immune how do we insulate education from the desire to be more productive? Can we?
So what does LSE mean?
