Morehouse College's strategic approach to computing infrastructure and educational resources

Morehouse College

Studying the Case of an African-American College

Morehouse College was officially founded Augusta Institute in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1867. It has a relatively unique and rich heritage serving some of the brightest minds in the black community since its founding. The college has many notable graduates including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Martin Luther King Jr. Despite this rich legacy, the college in its present state has many operational challenges. The size of the student body in 1997-1998 was roughly three thousand students who all paid roughly $18,000 in tuition and fees. The faculty was composed of over two hundred instructors; 165 of whom were full-time and a majority of whom held their doctorate degrees. One of the more popular degree programs was the Business Management and Administrative Services program.

Since the computer began to become developed at an exponential rate since the 1980s, many of the business operations began to incorporate computers in data management. This trend made it crucial for colleges to follow suit in education and training. Morehouse College chartered a chair in the mid-1990s to 1) evaluate the effectiveness of the present computing environment for both administrative and academic computing, 2) recommend

An environment that would best meet the college's computing needs, and 3) develop a strategic

Plan for transitioning from present to future computing environments (Shavers, 1999). This committee set the foundation for the schools modern technological platform.

How can you maintain resource productivity?

From an instructional perspective, both the faculty and the infrastructure systems can be thought of as resources that must have their productivity maximized. Productivity, in its basic economic form can be represented as the ratio of production output to what is required to produce it (Dickeson, V41N2). However, it is not always clear what metrics are best used to determine the level of productivity gained from various resources -- in many cases it is difficult to try to reduce the process of education into clear cut objectives as well as determine what resources were responsible for success. However, much of the current trend in education is trying to do exactly that.

One of the trends in education as a result has been to shift the responsibility of decision making away from faculty, and towards managers who can provide more accountability in the form of data in a more immediate and direct way (Toma, 2007). Many of the trends in educational governance have held institutions to forego much of their autonomy, and their ability to invest in things that are peripheral to the core requirements, to strict public accountability based on strict metrics. On the surface, strict governance seems to have a rational component, however at the same time it takes the decision making opportunities to the people who are actually designing the educational experience and shifts these responsibilities to external bodies that could be completely out of touch with the substance of the educational process.

Much of the non-core, periphery of campus opportunities are also following a similar direction. Academic programs and other enterprises at the periphery of U.S. universities and colleges -- including the most prominent ones -- increased markedly over the past two decades or so; in addition, at research universities, faculty members are more involved in outside ventures, often as individual entrepreneurs, and auxiliary enterprises such as housing and dining are increasingly important (Toma, 2007). Furthermore, institutions focused exclusively on the convenience of nontraditional students, including those operating as for-profit corporations, have emerged as a particular force and both of these trends have worked to reduce much of the responsibilities that traditional decision makers, such as faculty, have been allowed to develop educational objectives independently.

Other trends have also began to influence education that are strictly based on the possibilities that new technologies offer. For example, some institutions are offering free web-based learning opportunities that are nearly completely free to students. One such program is offered by a Harvard and MIT collaboration while other organizations such as Coursera and Udacity are providing similar opportunities (Wildavasky, 2012). Students can take free classes online with virtually no opportunities for teacher and student interactions. However, if the students learn the content, they can qualify to take exams around the world to earn qualifications. While many of the prices in education have skyrocketed, these free alternatives stand the possibility to become increasingly popular.

Schools with limited resources, such as Morehouse College, have no choice but to maximize the productivity of their resources at every turn. The must balance their legacy and tradition with the educational requirements that are currently manifesting based on a range of different trends in the industry. However, at the same time, there are many opportunities for schools to use technologies is new and creative ways. Technology can make it possible to provide instruction with limited resources. In the extreme examples, some educators are offering free instruction. However, traditional colleges could look to implement such solutions as a supplementary alternative to many of the types of content that budgetary pressures no longer allow for.