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Facing the brave new reality that the online education market is becoming highly competitive, academic leaders still ask: “Can we really outsource a whole degree?”
After all, if we outsource a whole degree...
- ...we lose control of the development process
- ...we won’t be able to use our faculty
- ...we won’t be able to control quality
- ...but mostly, it’s just, well, unthinkable. Isn’t outsourcing a degree like hiring out the university’s core function?
Not at all. The university’s core function is to provide credentials. For the past several hundred years it has done so via a commodity known as a degree. And those degrees have been made up of courses taught by in-house experts known as faculty members.
And the response to all of those issues is uniformly: not at all.
A New Model
The university’s obligation is to oversee the student’s path to degree completion. Whether or not the degree is developed, designed, and delivered in-house is no more relevant than the manufacture of automobiles. If automakers can outsource their “core competencies,” why can’t colleges and universities?
If outsourcing is creating a revolution of efficiency, cost-effectiveness and speed in business, why not education? If outsourcing is enabling the most efficient deployment of resources in operations as diverse as call centers and iron foundries, why would it not work in colleges and universities?
Admittedly, a gargantuan bureaucracy of regulators, accreditation agencies, and administrative offices have been built around the idea that degrees should be developed and deployed in-house.
Slow But Steady Change
However, as the distance education market becomes more and more competitive, it will be necessary for education to change. The most progressive schools will go first. They always do.
Not that long ago, within the last 10 years, schools were mortified at the thought that their accreditation agencies might find out that they, gasp, advertised for students. Advertising was thought to be a vulgar form of expression, far beneath the vaunted standards of “the academy.”
Checked your email lately?
Clearly, many, many schools have decided that--no matter the accreditation consequences--the way to get new students and grow is to advertise. The progressive schools went first. Scoffed upon as interlopers who even had a profit motive, they soldiered on, enduring the scorn of the traditional academy as a badge of honor.
Today, they are rewarded with a huge, influential presence on the higher education landscape.
Outsourcing Is Coming
Higher education will change and adapt to outsourcing, just as it has to advertising. There is no innate reason that a school cannot outsource an entire degree.
The progressive schools are doing it now, and will be doing it much more in the future.
Will you be one of them?
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