Opinion
So many extraordinary outcomes are achieved by people in education.
Too often, those achievements are in spite of, rather than because of the environment and the constraints they work in.
After several weeks of the Operation Scandi hearings, I was left not with surprise or shock, to be honest. I would bet that most people who have been around the sector for a while would be familiar with governance issues similar or worse.
What did occur to me was that those issues of jobs for mates in-house, jobs for mates in big shiny contracting behemoths, defiance of norms, public expectations, transparency and efficiency were an extravagance enabled by the golden years of uncapped growth. Burn a couple of million on a vanity project? No worries, just recruit a little harder next year. Sick of listening to others and want to just push ahead with your capital program? Sure, the enrolment numbers are on the up, do what you want.
No one in charge will say that is quite fair. Others at the bottom of our highly status-conscious sector may demur.
While some will revel and others recoil at the squirming testimony of witnesses on the stand during the Operation Scandi investigation, the livestreamed hearings by NSW ICAC should be a valued invitation to the rest of the sector to consider doing a few things very differently.
The bigger picture behind the allegations is the critical one for the sector. The vast majority of the issues raised revolve around whether university revenue was spent well. But to improve the results we get from spending, we need to change the way we operate.
Most revenue comes from taxpayers – via government – or from student fees.
I would argue that taxpayers fixate on a panoply of grievances, with university issues just one of many concerns, and there is not a lot of evidence that they are any more angry about HE than they are about roads, housing, supermarket pricing, taxes, or a dozen other issues.
Which leaves us with students. I argue that when university revenue is not effectively spent, it is students that primarily suffer – both directly, in terms of less effective services and education experience, and indirectly, in terms of squandering the savings and the loans that they are contributing.
White the Job Ready Graduates fee scheme is a significant issue here, ultimately the primary issue for students is not one of price, but value.
Community credibility and student dissatisfaction frequently ties back to high fees and perceptions of low value in return.
Addressing this issue of value is a non-negotiable if the sector wishes to regain trust.
The confluence of public governance issues, AI fears and knee-jerk regulation across multiple spheres and severe revenue constraints has at last made apathy and an addiction to business as usual unviable.
Students and the community must believe that tertiary education courses are worth the scale of the investment of time, energy and money that they make to participate in post-secondary education.
We need to be brave and open enough to upend past practices when required, if that means we can find ways to spend scarce resources.
I need to declare my own interest here. I am a consultant (although now I see how much consultants are paid, I think my title has been to grandiose, so are better described as an external service provider). I have also worked in-house.
I believe that righteously-enforced orthodoxy proscribing how universities are organised are a major stumbling point.
I believe existing views on consultants and in-house staff need to be re-thought if we are to get to a point where we can operate more effectively, with more integrity and deliver greater value to students – but they entail breaking three taboos that are fiercely held by too many in the sector. I have (somewhat nervously) outlined my three taboo-defying principles below.
Principle 1: Consultants are neither bad nor good.
External expertise can be incredibly valuable to an HE organisation. Too often it has been valuable only to the consultants who purport to provide it. The nexus between the expensively-suited HE executives who control procurement and the expensively-suited consultants who are selected on the basis of brand or metaphorical beauty must be broken. Equally, the use of outside staff and or services is essential and/or highly advantageous in some cases.
Institutions have to write briefs better, identify when to use consultants more transparently, select firms better and manage contracts more effectively. Also start to extract better value, moving to agile partnerships rather than poorly-conceived projects shackled in pro forma 90-page contract gibberish. Partnerships and new forms of engagement could unlock far greater value than the standardised, myopic project procurement process so often used.
Principle 2: In-house is not always better – or cheaper (but often it can be).
A university is its people. But it is ridiculous to expect its people to be able to deliver every specialised function that a great university requires.
From the student point of view, there is no inherent virtue in all work being completed in-house. That is only a priority for some staff within the institution, who have a conflict of interest as they stand to benefit from employment. There is of course great value in building a corpus of in-house expertise, continuity of organisational knowledge and (sometimes) process, and significantly lower cost.
However, the principal of internal completion of work having inherent virtue has been sacrosanct for too long and fed by a cavalcade of poorly managed, expensive outsourcing projects. It has also been fed by fears bred by poorly conceived and justified change programs, that have cut jobs without adequate justification.
If we just face up to the fact that there have been issues from both in-house and contracted-in people, then we can start to work towards better outcomes for students.
Irrational prejudice in favour of one mode of work is not helping anyone except those who stand to benefit from employment in sustaining it.
Principle 3: Getting better value for student fees must become the guiding light.
Better value must become the organising principle. Not doing things in house, not outsourcing to big brand consultants, not doing things how they have always been done.
The one thing that all your stakeholders, including students and community will agree on is that getting better value for students is a great primary goal – alongside growing the knowledge pool.
This is not about price. It’s about value. This is value for money invested, for education experience provided, for learning and graduate outcomes achieved, for knowledge created.
Significant positive change is within reach.
If we can accept and genuinely embrace these three taboos, there is a massive opportunity to get better outcomes for students, staff and community.
Fixing the foundations of a sustainable, more effective system that more responsibly expends student fees is not that complicated, if you are prepared to do the work, gather institutional and environmental evidence and leave some sacred cows behind. You need an organisational strategy with realistic targets, which cascades to each business unit. You need to rewrite every PD so that it aligns with the goals of their business unit. You need to train, empower and manage the performance of all staff, not just the popular compliant ones, to work towards those goals. And you need to regularly measure outcomes and communicate and have honest, transparent conversations about what is working and what is not, why and what can be done to improve.
For students and the community to believe that the experience of their time and money is unlocking value, we need new approaches.
Disclosure: Tim Winkler is Editor-In-Chief of Future Campus and also works as a service provider in the tertiary sector.