The next few years will see a dramatic change in the University landscape in the UK - with more and more universities being forced to act like corporations in their management. While this will create tensions at the undergraduate level - with the need to balanace government regulations with the University mandate, thereby making it difficult for the universities to think like a private, commercial organizations, it is at the post graduate level that I see a real opportunity for change. Change that will improve the university profitability, student experience and market access.
While this change will manifest itself in many ways, I want to concentrate on standardization of processes across universities - at the post graduate level - that could be the low hanging fruit for the universities to adopt. While certain processes are outside of the university control at the undergraduate level (eg in Admissions, where significant amount of process requirements are dictated by UCAS), the University are free from such shakles at the post graduate level. In addition, they also have pricing and curriculum flexibility. This is combined with an increased flow of international (and especially Asian) students at the pre-experience Masters level and we have an opportunity for standardization that could reduce the costs for the university while streamlining the processes for international students.
Take international post-graduate admissions for example. Most of the universities ask international students to apply online - and ask for the same information. Thus, every university stores same data about the applicant (unlike at the undergraduate level where UCAS manages the data). Also, at the post graduate level, universities face more competition from international universities (a student from China will not apply to just the UK universities - but may also apply to universities in the US , Canada & Australia). A common data mart - not at the national level as UCAS in the UK, but at an international level - through a third party such as large publishers or IT houses, would reduce the cost for universities and accelerate the process for the applicants. The same data mart could be expanded to include international alumni, thereby creating a loop between the applicants and the alumni, across multiple countries and multiple universities.
Concepts such as above are not difficult to deploy - multinationals have common global systems and processes for activities such as attendence management, CRM, performance appraisals, expense management, ERP etc, with common data mart - covering all the countries they operate in. Since Universities do not operate in as many countries, multiple universities across various regions can access the third party data mart as long as certain process standards and security protocols have been agreed to (eg the common input data from international applicants that will be shared with all the universities and data that will be university specific).
While there are enough standardization opportunities within the post graduate education in areas such as admissions, student records management, scheduling, VLE etc, I believe the lowest hanging fruits for standardization are in the areas of international admissions and international alumni management. These two areas, while important to the university, are not focussed on the 'inside' operations. Rather they are focussed on the 'outside' operations and therefore, do not change the inside status much, while still delivering significant cost savings, increased market access and a streamlined student experience.
The problem is at the post graduate level, the universities consider Admissions and Alumni management as their core operation - processing data that they would not like to relinquish. While this is a noble aim, in reality, the data is not exclusive or unique to them (are they really naive to believe that if they get hold of an international applicant data, the applicant would not go to any other university - or how many universities really have up-to-date alumni data that is not otherwise available on social networking platforms?). If the data is not exclusive, why pretend otherwise - why not standardize the process, put the data in a data mart and use the savings elsewhere, and in doing so, simplify the process for thousands of international applicants?
