College Trend Case Study

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.

What are the challenges for underfunded educational institutions? Our society places a great emphasis on postsecondary education. The United States has some of the most sought after and prestigious in the world. However, at the same time, there are many educational institutions that struggle to maintain the resources that are necessary to provide a state-of-the-art environment to learning cutting edge technologies. Even schools with large endowments are forced to make the most of their resources in times of recession or economic hardship (Wildavasky, 2012).

One of the most fundamental questions in education then becomes how best to use resources to meet the educational objectives of the institution at virtually any level in the system. Colleges such as Morehouse College are at a comparative disadvantage when funding is considered. As President Massey observed, being one of the riches black colleges was an oxymoron, for "among black colleges, there are the poor and the less poor" (Shavers, 1999).

The school deemed that technology was an essential component to educating future business leaders, however providing the infrastructure to develop the technologies to prepare students was certainly challenging. The amount of technology funded must be on a level in which it provides the resources that will directly result in educational outcomes and there is little room to expend resources that do not provide such a return.

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.