I had an inspiring conversation this morning with the chief strategist at an ed tech company. We were talking about PCE/O units, and she noted that she enjoys working with these units because they are built for agility, innovation and action. She also noted that the students PCE/O units historically serve represent the only growth opportunity for higher education.
And yet...
Walk the campuses of mid-tier, tuition dependent privates right now and you'll find a different perspective. Leadership, staring down the financial crisis and reaching for the nearest budgeting cliche, decides the fix is to atomize the PCE unit, break it up, distribute the pieces across the university, and call it operational efficiency. To be clear, this isn't efficiency. You can't distribute purpose built infrastructure across departments that were never designed to hold it and expect it to survive. What gets lost is the flexibility, the specialized advising, and the credential pathways nobody else on campus understands.
These universities aren't streamlining. They're refusing to evolve, and calling it strategy, and that's terribly sad.
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