Daniel Seymour is president of Qsystems, an education and management consulting firm. The following piece is an excerpt from his new book, Once Upon a Campus: Lessons for Improving Quality and Productivity in Higher Education.
A direct look at the core critical process of higher education, learning and teaching, illustrates the full nature of the insidious effects that unnecessary complexity has on productivity.
For a number of years, William Massy and Robert Zemsky have called our attention to what they call the deconstruction of the undergraduate curriculum. They contend that over the last two decades, as faculty members have pursued specialized knowledge in their disciplines, there has been a shift away from required courses. Rather than taking courses in an ordered sequence, students must develop their own sense of how the various elements of knowledge fit together.
The deconstruction of the curriculum has had important economic consequences in terms of course proliferation and the need to hire more faculty (especially adjunct faculty members to teach core required courses that are abandoned by tenured professors in pursuit of more exotic interests).
The increased fragmentation of faculty work life and the nonsystematic nature of curriculum changes have increased complexity in at least four ways: 1) mistakes and defects; 2) breakdowns and delays; 3) inefficiencies; and 4) variation.
When mistakes occur, there is usually an attempt to fix them. Rework adds cost to the production of products or services. Sometimes a defect cannot be repaired, so it is eliminated. Scrap adds cost, too. What types of mistakes and defects result from the curriculum deconstruction described by Massy and Zemsky? The obvious problem is poor academic performance. With course proliferation and minimal sequencing, students can easily end up in courses for which they are ill-prepared. When they perform poorly, they sometimes take the course over. If the problem occurs in their major, they may switch to another major.
In some circumstances, students may drop out of school, transfer or be forced to leave. In all cases, the resulting mistakes and defects are the institutional equivalent of a leaky hose.
The second type of complexity is breakdown and delay. There is little predictability in the system described by Massy and Zemsky. Take the basic shift away from required courses, stir in a steady mix of new courses, add a splash of poor advising services, and you have the perfect recipe for a planning and economic nightmare--the inability to match supply and demand. The system suffers from significant oversubscription of some courses while the professors of other courses hawk their classes in the student newspaper and on bulletin boards, trying to avoid a dreaded cancellation notice from administration.
Before long, a four-year degree becomes a five-year degree as students bounce from one closed-out course to another. Given a constant set of resources, if the time taken to graduate increases by 25 percent, the productivity of the system necessarily decreases by 25 percent.
Inefficiencies result from using more time, energy, or materials in a process than are absolutely necessary. A deconstructed curriculum generates many inefficiencies. For example, when the content of one course is developed without any regard to any other course, a student may easily be exposed to the same concept--say, Maslow's hierarchy of needs--over and over again. Like our notorious "Request for Vacation or Absence from Office" form, the time spent rehashing Maslow for the fifth time is an inefficiency that is manifested by a classroom full of students engaged in window-gazing, doodling and daydreaming instead of being actively involved in value-added learning.
Variation, the final form of complexity, is a particular problem in the learning and teaching process. One can argue that too little variation is a problem. A lockstep series of courses with standardized teaching methods might be too focused on producing graduates who think and act alike. On the other hand, too much variation is a problem as well. Every college or university professor has launched into a spirited discussion of a topic, such as the effects of the Crimean War on the diplomatic relations of Austria, only to realize that half the class--the half with the knitted brows--has never heard of the Crimean War. The professor is then forced to add steps to the process--a short capsule summary of the conflict in spite of the fact that 19th century European history was supposedly a prerequisite for the course.
Curriculum deconstruction increases variation because most professors have little knowledge of the base competencies of their incoming students each semester.
Again, as complexity increases, throughput and productivity decrease. Scarce resources are tied up doing non-value-added work. Such work--filling out useless forms, tracking down extra signatures, teaching concepts that should have been covered in earlier course work--leaves less and less time for value-added activities that would meet or exceed the expectations of customers. The effect is not unlike the image painted by the words of the English satirist Jonathan Swift. Both Gulliver and the body of the educational enterprise are slowly but surely immobilized by thousands of constraints of Lilliputian proportions.