Doing More With Less Is A Lame Excuse

My friend and colleague Michael Jones' recent piece for UPCEA makes the compelling case that applying entrepreneurial discipline through online and professional continuing education (PCE) units is highly effective, particularly for mid-tier tuition dependent private universities.

Michael is 100% correct in his claim that PCE units "have always operated closer to the market than the rest of the university," generating alternative revenues and absorbing unfunded mandates that the traditional academic side cannot or refuses to take on. And this is precisely why deconstructing PCE units in this moment of enrollment and budget crises is a catastrophic strategic error. Mid-tier privates reeling under these exigencies are choosing, in effect, to disable the one unit within the university built to reach the market that represents their most realistic opportunity for alternative revenues.

Once again, I'll note how utterly disappointing it is to watch mid-tier privates consolidating their PCE units into hack back-office administrative units led by unctuous and doughy consultants-turned-employees with no experience in adult, online, or workforce education. Michael's framework describes exactly what is playing out at many of these privates. Stripping away and dismissing PCE expertise and replacing it with uninspired robotic staff and disingenuous consultants is creating chaos, lost market share, additional unbudgeted costs, and an overall paralysis that ill-equipped and wilting "leaders" are passing off as reorganization.

We all know that non-traditional initiatives outside a tuition dependent private university's traditional line of business (residential, full-time undergraduate education) never survive when they are led by unqualified people lacking any real skill, self-awareness, or vision. Michael keenly observes that PCE units succeed because they are led by and staffed with people who do things the traditional university cannot. So a hack back-office unit filled with transactional dullards unfamiliar with the professional & continuing education space will simply default to what they know, which is too often simple self-preservation. 

Michael's closing argument reminds us that now is the most critical time to lean into and exploit PCE units because they are already serving the "learners the demographic cliff is pushing away from traditional pipelines." Private universities that gut or bury their PCE units are cutting off their own future enrollment base, replacing market expertise with generic administrative slop incapable of executing on anything and calling it a cost-saving measure.