“Education has a varied infinitely in time and places. Today, it tries to make of the individual an autonomous personality. In Athens, they sought to form cultivated souls, informed, subtle, full of measure and harmony, capable of enjoying the beauty and the joys of pure speculation; in Rome, they wanted above all for children to become man of action, devoted to military glory, indifferent to letters and the arts”. (Durkheim 1956)
Introduction
In an increasingly knowledge-dependent economy, colleges and universities take on more central role in society’s institutional fabric, and their performance has definite repercussions throughout the society. As a result family, entrepreneurs, voluntary organization and corporate ventures take a stronger role in the governance of education and the institutional landscape changes from monistic to a pluralistic world.
These new institutional realities present a challenge to control institutional theories in education. A college/ university, for example can be handful of students sitting in a class and trying to unlearn what they have learned, a group of youngsters learning how to write project report, or a group of adolescents in computer lab busy on surfing web pages or spending time in chatting. The purpose of this paper is to tell why out of this stupendous variety of feasible form-this or that particularly one is selected and whose interest might be best served by that selected arrangement.
On the other hand what corporate needs, is to understand the trade-offs involved in using one form of institution to the exclusion of other possible ones, according to their needs educational institutes shall know what best alternatives a society shall have and policy makers for educational institutes shall know them. Which social group might be favored or advantaged by this particular framework.
Perspective of educational institute as a company
The natural question that may arise is that why we should construct a framework which forms an isomorphism between educational institute and a company. Following are some reasons to do so.
- To increase practical knowledge in respective interest area for students and their teachers
- On the basis of outstanding higher skill level of teachers to reach the state when college/university will be natural expert authority for respective interest area sought out the firms in any problems with improving of skills for their staff.
- To create natural space for student´s involvement to managed practice in firms and future employers
- To create space for future short-terms stages of college/university teachers in firms and companies.
- Creation of specialized study materials for short terms educational activities (one or two days typically) according to firm´s requirements oriented to practical training and evaluate their efficiency in educational process.
- To match the corporate needs and implanting those in educational institutes
- To concretize the commercial aspect that is prevalent in the educational sector.
- To have a stronger outlook towards industry-institute relationship
Business Education Alliance
To run education as a business the first step may be to form an alliance between business and education. There should must exist a strong alliance between business firms/ corporate and education institutes to facilitate a mutually beneficial partnership between business and education to prepare productive citizens. Following determinants shall be taken care of while making this kind of alliance
- To facilitate an alliance between business and education, that will create trust and understanding, educate and promote dialogue, and identify mutual benefits between the two partner groups.
- To prepare citizens to become part of an effective workforce by identifying principle skills, attitudes, and values required to ensure successful employment for all students.
- To share new and existing resources with area educators promoting the college-to-work principles and expediting communication between faculties-students and employer.
- To promote lifelong learning to and throughout the entire community in order to help our population compete for employment in the 21st century’s competitive global economy.
- To create a trust in the mind of common citizen that the alliance is not for commercial aspect but to enhance job opportunities to prospective eligible students.
- To remove the third parties those are involved in various aspects of education.
- Selection of students must be made with utmost care so that the basic objective of the industry can be achieved.
Business-Education model : C3PF Model
Now a day’s many for-profit corporations are targeting the higher education market. Analyzing their strategies helps reveal possible effects of these entrants on the incumbent colleges’ and universities’ business models. It is difficult to be precise about strategies of the new entrants. There are several possible ways to categorize the entry strategies for the new players. This analysis focuses on five elements that seem to have the most repercussions for traditional colleges and universities: the courses entrants offer, their target customer group, where their content originates, the pedagogy they employ, and their pricing.
Course: Many of the companies are focused on the area such as management, information technologies, applied sciences and many others. The employees from these areas are focusing on continuing education for their profession, but many universities/colleges offer a fulltime bachelors/masters degree which may not be suitable for them for many different reasons, may be the content are not useful for their knowledge up gradation, it is irrelevant for their use or doest match with the industry needs.
Hence the course should contain designed by the industry/business related material or shall have entrepreneurial development skills or should be focused on great employability skills but with consistent review and up gradation
Client: Consistent with the predominance of business courses, the major clients are corporate employees. If the course is suitable for the corporate employees they will be occupying the big size of entire higher education market and will grow rapidly
Hence if the course is designed to contain all relevant contents that are suitable for the industry persons then they will definitely opt for it for their knowledge up gradation and for general students it will be an opportunity to learn industry skills with a perfect blend of practical knowledge.
Content: Course material can be generated in three primary ways. First, they can hire their own staffs to develop new materials. Second, they can license existing courses from colleges and universities. Third, they can contract directly with individual research scholars or other subject experts for material and courses. How contents are developed is of vital importance to colleges /universities and businesses, whose interests lie in keeping the third source of content to a minimum. Indeed, several major players appear to be pursuing all three options. While deals at the university level are attractive, thus far they have been
quite expensive; the long-term trend will probably be for entrants to source material directly from faculty
Pedagogy: As per the source of the content the pedagogical approach should be broad and diverse. Since there will be variety of clients for these type of course, according to their suitability the pedagogy shall be designed. Asynchronous technologies shall be used instead of traditional technologies. A major breakthrough is in the use of technology for education that will come with the widespread adoption of broadband that allows streaming, realistic, two-way video into the home.
Fees: Fees structure design has the greatest potential to disturb education’s current environment. Use of above mentioned teaching pedagogy which uses great advantage of new technology will allow very low fees course since the marginal cost of delivering the course is very negligible. Finally, education is an experience good—the purchase decision involves perceptions and interpretations of signals about quality. Thus, the powerful implication for colleges and universities is that extensive price competition is unlikely to occur immediately.
Conclusion
Who will win in the long run—entrants exploiting the corporate market and then moving into the traditional university market via distance learning, or institutions have already begun. It depends principally on the relative attractiveness of the two markets. The corporate market is the fastest growing and the most profitable. Additionally, and perhaps most important, the demands of the corporate market force quicker development along a steeper technological trajectory, where colleges/universities and businesses develop new pedagogies and build the capabilities needed to succeed when they enter the traditional university market. Two important conclusions can be drawn from this analysis. The first is that the direct competitive threat to most of the traditional core offerings of colleges and universities will be delayed. Instead, alliance of college/universities and business are largely focused on the corporate market and graduate level training, and at only slightly lower prices. That is the good news. The bad news is that well funded competitors, often backed by brand name institutions through alliances, will be hard to beat once they are established. First mover advantages that they can exploit, particularly the more rapid development of the skills needed to harness the new technologies and develop new pedagogies will put them in good stead as they gradually transition to compete more directly in the traditional higher education market.
:: Rahul Mohare, S. Subramaniam, Aniriddha Akarte ( Autor can be contacted at Datta Meghe Institute of Management Studies or email to : mohare.rahul@gmail.com , subramaniamdmims@yahoo.com , aniruddha_akarte@yahoo.com)
