Outsourcing the experts

Just months away from budget approval season,  with rising costs and increased enrollment in mind, institutions have started to hire consultants to help college and university administrators identify where they can cut back — for some, where they can save hundreds of millions of dollars.

One of those consultants, Bain & Company, recently made recommendations to the University of Carolina’s chancellor that could save the system upward of $150 million dollars, according to an article in yesterday’s New York Times.

Some of those recommendations included consolidating the university’s management (more than half of its managers have three or fewer people reporting directly to them, according to the article), as well as streamlining the more than 100 university institutes and centers, many of which have their own HR, IT and finance departments.

The cost for the analysis is $3 million dollars — a small price in the face of more than $150 in savings.

Some critics told the Times that hiring consultants to deal with university finances was too (dangerously) close to treating institutions like corporations instead of institutes of higher education.

Tanya Smith, president of Local 1 of University Professional and Technical Employees, which represents about 900 Berkeley employees. “What we’re seeing is centralization and treatment of the university as if it were a corporation. And I’m just not sure education and efficiency are on the same page.”

On paper, the idea of a consultant may not be bad — and it looks like UNC saved serious money that way. But you have to wonder how well a firm that deals with dozens of institutions each year can understand what’s important to the campus and what’s not, independent of finances. Cutting a department that isn’t efficient but is a central part of the campus culture could do more harm than good.

Tech Tuesday: Goodbyes, Twitter 101

UWereGoodWhileULasted: College news aggregator UWire has officially terminated its service, which makes College Ave a very sad camper.

The site was founded in founded in 1994, and since then has reposted content from more than 850 college media oulets, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Student editors were paid to search these oulets for news, and post them under categories that ranged from politics, to arts, to College Ave’s favorite: Science/Tech. Did it aggregate the best, most-hard hitting journalism? No. But it gave insight into what was going on at close to 1,000 higher ed institutions across the country, which never could have been done by a single editor or publication alone. UWire hasn’t given a reason for its sudden disappearance.

Goodbye, UWire. You were good to CollegeAve.

I wonder who’s going to jump on this void in the market ..


When you should take your money and run: Australia’s Griffith University has added a mandatory course on Twitter in it’s journalism curriculum.  An entire course. (Let that settle). Personally I’ve never thought the social networking site was all that complex, but that puts me at odds with Griffith U. Professor Jacqui Ewart, who says “some students’ tweets are not as in depth as you might like.”

I have a secret for Ewart: Neither are the tweets from more than half of all twitter users. There will always be people who tweet that they had broccoli for dinner. It’s good to know how to use Twitter, but does that take 15 weeks? Abosolutely not Doubt it.

When I researched this story more, I found there was actually a point to the course: for students to tweet ongoing assesments of their own work. As the 340 first-year journalism students write and file news stories, according to an article in news.com.au, they are supposed to Tweet any struggles or problems they had with the assignment. It’s a good way to get the conversation going — but wouldn’t that be more productive in person?