Higher Education Strategy and Planning

A Professional Guide

Tony Strike

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351797061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Higher Education Strategy and Planning draws together a team of expert contributors from across the sector to offer contemporary descriptions of practice in Higher Education and critical reflections on that practice. Many of the tools and techniques transcend the particular national system within which they are situated and therefore have global relevance for all those interested in strategy and planning in Higher Education.

Containing chapters on each of the major functions or capabilities of strategic planners, critiques of global policy trends, framework examples and explanations of the main league tables both in the UK and globally, the book is divided into five main parts:

• Context and Positioning;

• Integrated Planning;

• Centrality, Co-ordination and Connection;

• Analytical Capacity and Capability;

• Insight and Information.

This text offers a contemporary representation of strategic planning and will be an indispensable guide for all those who work in or study Higher Education, particularly aimed at those who work in strategy, planning and leadership roles.

Part 1
Context and positioning

Chapter 1
Locating universities in a globalising world

Susan L. Robertson and Kris Olds

Global dynamics/local spaces

Few will disagree that since the 1980s universities and higher education sectors around the globe have faced significant challenges to and undergone major transformations in their missions, governance structures, funding streams, institutional footprints, student populations and relationships to the wider economy and societies they serve (Barnett, 2009; King, 2009). No longer is it a truism that changes in the sector happen at glacial pace. Far from it! Almost overnight, new university infrastructures mushroom; a visible outcome of strategies deployed by respective governments and institutions aimed at creating talented, highly skilled labour through 21st-century knowledge innovations. From Singapore’s Global Schoolhouse project (Olds, 2007) to Malaysia’s EduCity, Qatar’s Education City, Melbourne’s Knowledge Index, to more recently, Stanford University’s ‘Stanford Ignite’ offering entrepreneurship courses, Silicon Valley-style, to high-fee-paying students in London (Coughlan, 2015: 1), all suggest institutional ambition, innovation, place and pace are qualities to be harnessed and nurtured.

Cities, too, appear to change overnight, their colour and character an outcome of institutional entrepreneurship, national export strategies promoting education as a profitable services sector, and the investment decisions of aspiring middle-class families around their child’s and their own futures. Cities like London, Prague, Sydney, New York, Los Angeles, Auckland and Vancouver have all been transformed by large numbers of largely international students attending education institutions – from language classes and foundation courses to graduate and undergraduate programmes.

Check the websites of the respective institutions, and one is immediately struck by the creative application of a series of reputational devices used in the marketing of the university. One or more of the proliferation of world university rankings is used to promote some quality of the institution, the city as a place to study, the historical significance of the institution or the articulation of the degree to other opportunities around the world (see Chapter 13). For example, Lingnan University in Hong Kong markets itself as ‘A Top 10 Liberal Arts College in Asia’ citing the Forbes, 2015 ranking index. By way of contrast, its neighbour – the University of Hong Kong – illustrates its shift up the reputation ladder by referring to its better performance on the Times Higher’s world university ranking. New Zealand’s universities draw on the government’s Brand New Zealand stamp of approval, which aims to boost confidence in its quality. Shift geography and we can see that the University of Bologna, in recently setting up an institutional presence in Buenos Aires, Argentina, cited its history – as one of the oldest universities in Europe (founded in 1088) as its unique selling point (University of Bologna, 2015). In doing so, it also joins a rapidly growing number of universities with branch-campus portfolios around the world. Macquarie University in Australia markets its programmes as Bologna compliant; a gesture in the direction of its undergraduate and graduate students wanting to ensure that they can parse their qualifications in the global marketplace.

In England, UK, government policy in higher education is being reshaped as a result of responses to local and global dynamics. These include dramatic reductions in funding to drive down the fiscal deficit, the governing of the sector through introducing a more explicit set of policies and mechanisms aimed at unleashing market forces, opening up the sector to for-profit providers, and a shift in the relationship between government and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) (Browne, 2010; BIS, 2011a, 2011b; Robertson, 2013). With the maximum undergraduate fee permissible at a state-funded university set at around £9,250 with any increases likely to be linked to the new Teaching Excellence Framework, and the block grant for many subjects receiving funding from the sector’s regulator removed (except for science and research budgets), university leaders and managers within the sector are unclear what the long-term future might look like and how best to manage in this very different governance environment (see Chapter 7).

Adding extra pressure in this already unstable environment are immigration policies that have placed new restrictions on those arriving in the UK to study; the UK has now experienced an ongoing decline in the numbers of international students enrolled in UK universities (BIS, 2013). It is also unclear what the longer-term ramifications will be – both to government and to student aspirations – as a result of significant graduate unemployment, the introduction of student fees and the spiralling costs of the student loan book. These root and branch changes in the governing of English higher education have created new uncertainties about the future of higher education, and what this might mean for the very idea of the university, as well as for questions of quality, access, social mobility and longer-term sustainability (Reay, 2011; McGettigan, 2013; Robertson, 2013).

One could cite many more examples of the manifestations of changes in the sector, both global and local. However, the purpose here is not to provide an exhaustive catalogue of changes, interesting though that is. Rather, it is to step back a bit and look at their dynamics so as to understand their nature, scope, scale and organising logics at work. And if, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues, these transformations are part of a wider ‘paradigmatic transition’ facing all societies and universities around the world (Santos, 2010: 1), it is important to understand what this means so as to guide them in ways that are useful for the institutions and for the sector, as well as how best to manage their intended and unintended outcomes. This opening chapter will also explore some of the key issues and challenges facing the contemporary university, including issues of access, student mobility, the positional good nature of higher education, new pedagogical innovations, expanding institutional geographies of universities, the rise of new players in the sector including for-profits, and the commercialisation of ideas, knowledge and education.

Competition and higher education in the new world order

The challenge facing many higher education sectors and their academic leaders and managers, to broadly realise a new knowledge-based development model, is driven by three logics anchored in what Streeck calls ‘capitalism’s animal spirit’ – competition (Streeck, 2009). Streeck describes competition as:

the institutionally-protected possibility for enterprising individuals to pursue even higher profit from an innovative manner at the expense of other producers. The reason why competition is so effective as a mechanism of economic change is that where it is legitimate in principle, as it must be almost by definition in a capitalist economy, what is needed to mobilise the energy of innovative entrepreneurship is not collective deliberation or a majority vote but, ideally, just one player who, by deviating from the established way of ‘doing things’ can force all others to follow, at the ultimate penalty of extinction.

(Streeck, 2009: 242–243)

The rise of recruiters of international students to feed institutional numbers, Australia’s rapid development as a highly sophisticated, intelligence-driven, export machinery in higher education, and the emergence and expansion of Europe’s Bologna Process to create a European Higher Education Area, are all cases in point. As Sassen (2006) observes, such innovative entrepreneurship (almost unknowingly) sets in train a new way of doing things – or a new logic – so that it is impossible not to respond. In other words, new logics signal a change in the rules of the game. As we know, competition (wrapped in the rhetoric of access, efficiency, effectiveness and quality) has been on the agenda of a number of governments, as well as influential international organisations, from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to the World Bank. Competition, however, takes numerous forms – each with its own logic. For the purposes set out here in analysing the higher education sector, three logics are analysed that are central to how many universities function today.

A tale of three logics powering higher education in a global world

Logic 1: corporatisation

The first logic, corporatisation, is anchored in the idea of New Public Management (Hood, 1991) and popularised by highly influential writers such as Osborne and Gaebler (1991) in the 1990s. New Public Management asks: How can the values of business (competition, frugality, risk, choice, value for money, entrepreneur-ship) be used in the re/organisation of public services so as to enable those services to be delivered more efficiently and effectively?

Corporatisation was the outcome of the New Public Management (NPM) which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as a way of describing a family of changes in public administration (Hood, 1991; Osborne and Gaebler, 1991) which were globalised. These changes were designed to slow down, or reverse, growth in government spending and staffing. Driven by the ‘crowding out’ thesis, the view was that by removing government from key areas of activity this would enable the private sector to thrive and stimulate growth and greater efficiencies. In its earlier days, this included the privatisation of a range of university activities, from catering services to cleaning, technology contracts, and publishing. More recently it has included services by firms such as INTO, Study Group and Navitas, sometimes in the form of joint ventures, aimed at both recruiting international students into foundation programmes and at helping them prepare for university studies, then setting them on their way through undergraduate programmes in the respective universities. Another example is the growth of private providers, many backed by real estate investment trusts (REITs), of student housing on or near university campuses (ICEF Monitor, 2015).

NPM had a major impact on the way in which universities delivered their core mission of teaching and research through the deployment of indicators and targets, the use of explicit standards and measures of performance, and parsimony in the use of resources. As Deem put it in the late 1990s:

Those who run universities are expected to ensure that such value is provided and their role as academic leaders is being subsumed by a greater concern with the overt management of sites, finance, staff, students, teaching and research. Universities are also being exhorted to raise both the standards of educational provision, and the quality of their teaching, learning and research outcomes, whilst prevailing government and funding council policies also require annual so-called ‘efficiency gains’ to be made, resulting in a declining unit of resource per student taught, less money for equipment and a decrease in research resourcing. At the same time, the emphasis on competition between universities for students, research income and academic research ‘stars’, has also served to stress the extent to which higher education can be described as operating under quasi-market conditions.

(1998: 48)

A key cultural shift for universities was therefore the emulation of the core values and practices of business, both in the ways in which the university was governed and the ways in which the university itself governed its academic and non-academic faculty (Deem, 1998; Olssen and Peters, 2005). NPM has dramatically altered the vision and mission of the university, away from Newman’s ‘Idea of a University’ that had stood as a fundamental anchor for more than a century (Newman, 1910), towards one which is necessarily mindful of the bottom line, and of its competitors – locally, nationally and internationally.

Logic 2: comparative competitivism

A second logic – ‘comparative competitivism’ – arises from the influential work of Michael Porter (1985) and was mobilised by the developed economies as a response to the global crisis for the developed West in the early 1970s, processes of deindustrialisation, and the rise of the Asian newly industrialising countries (sometimes deemed the ‘Asian Tigers’) (Robertson, 2013). Comparative competitivism asks: What is it that we can do or produce (trade, or gain a greater market share in), where we have an existing or potential advantage in relation to our competitors? For countries like the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, one answer was that once public sectors, like higher education, could open up private places to international students and charge full fees. Over time, these ‘service sectors’ would become a major revenue generator for instit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• List of contributors
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Introduction
• PART 1 Context and positioning
• PART 2 Integrated planning
• PART 3 Centrality, co-ordination and connection
• PART 4 Analytical capacity and capability
• PART 5 Insight and information
• Index