Month: September 2017

Boardman & Sauser (2008) identified “perspectives” as the fourth essence of systems engineering (SE). This is to say that individuals have different points of view in finding meaning in the thread of meaninglessness or finding meaning in the confusion of details. In most cases, perspectives could vary at extreme opposites such as Your east, my west; your cure, my poison; your choice, my constraint etc.

The systems engineer considers this paradox as insight into future worlds.

This raises the question of adaptability in systems engineering for increased value. The article on “School is a prison -and damaging our kids” by Peter Gray, explained that many successful entrepreneurs and innovators, such as Albert Einstein, said they hated school and learned despite it, not because of it. It follows that there was room for adaptability to pursue their desire to know and achieve stability.  However, the promise of stability by systems without provision for adaptability could lead to instability and crisis.

In the Boom Burst Boom film, the United States president was vociferous in 2008 about the growth of the economy, but shortly the recession hit, and crisis set in. Financial stability also causes people to be over-confident, especially when systems invest in the financial economy rather than the real economy.

The economy is a critical system which has been politically engineered and misguided by layering debt on debt (borrowing from one financial institution to pay another financial institution) and the forcing loans on people who may never pay them, and eventually get foreclosed. When people borrow cash to buy shares, in the name of investment, they do this in speculation that stocks go up so they can make profit. Systemically, this is not an investment, rather a speculation which could fail due to unforeseen circumstances such as the recession.

According to Zusman (2005), one of the major challenges facing higher education of the 21^st century is funding. The author further explained that the level of funding from the state for higher education increases when the state revenues are good. On the other hand, funding of higher education drops during the recession. Apart from the recession, inflation and growth in enrollment could also impact on the available funding. These uncertainties could lead to privatization of public schools in order to raise revenues. The privatization process may be partly or fully implemented across the sub-systems in the educational institution. Zusman (2005) pointed out that in some institutions, “high-demand, high-return professional programs like law or business, become fully or nearly fully funded by clients (students), business, or other private sources.” (p. 2).

Another way to support the higher education is to design a system in each institution which could serve as Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) in support of the funding needs of the larger system.

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Reference

Boardman, J., & Sauser, B. (2008). Systems thinking: Coping with 21st century problems. CRC Press.

Gray P (n.d) School is a prison and damaging our kids. Retrieved from  http://www.salon.com/2013/08/26/school_is_a_prison_and_damaging_our_kids/

Jones T. (2015) Boom Burst Boom. Retrieved from https://www.netflix.com/title/80097490

Zusman, A. (2005). Challenges facing higher education in the twenty-first century. American higher education in the twenty-first century: Social, political, and economic challenges, 2, 115-160.

Systems, are composed of parts or coordinating components. For example, the university system is made up of subsystems which could be campuses at different cities, and they grow organically extending to areas that have the potential for growth and resources. From a business perspective, competition always influences the growth in population and complexity of a system, and in some cases for the wrong reason.

Why then are the systems growing? Could the growth be profit oriented?

The growth should be as a result of what they have to offer, and the value of the offering. The expected goal of educational systems is to provide the corporations with high-quality workforce, and it is important to note how the schools ultimately impact on the performance of the corporations. In the first instance, new knowledge and practices from faculty research in universities are infused into the courses, thus improving the learning experience of the students. As a result, the students, who are future employees of corporations, are equipped with new knowledge which helps them perform better. This is the reason corporations pay taxes, and the bigger systems (such as the state) allocates resources to schools in order to provide high-quality labor to the corporations, which ultimately contributes to the sustainability of the corporation and the state.

The idea is to invest in education, which leads to better employees and better results for the corporations. Better results translate to better money and profitability. This chain of events model the supply chain system, where each stage is dependent on the previous in order profitably get to the next level and desired product, which is consumed by the corporation. By extension, the product becomes the input to the corporations.

Systems which provide the same products (students) are in constant competition for limited resources (funding), which could be artificially created by larger systems (the state) when there are cuts in the funding for education. Cutting back on funding could lead to schools engaging in larger intake of students, which could impact on quality of teaching and feedback given to students. As a result, the lowered quality of teaching also leads to lower quality of students in terms of what they are supposed to know in order to be effective at the workforce. Cuts on funding also means inadequate reward in a system, and this could lead to logistics issues and the option of switching programs and courses to be conducted fully online. Another impact of cuts on funding in schools is students moving out of state to schools of best offer. In most instances, the students may move on with their lives in the new state and not return.

This is where adaptability plays a key role. Systems need to be designed to be flexible and adaptive in order to survive unexpected situations. However, flexibility and adaptability should be in moderation. This is to say that systems that are too rigid are liable to break under extreme circumstances. On the other hand, systems that are too flexible may not have the tenacity to withhold its structure in extreme circumstances.

 

 

While interacting with colleagues in a higher institution, a senior colleague made a statement, which made a lot of sense to me, that “education is the only business where the customer is the product”. This is a profound reality if we are to look at education through the lens of business and marketing. It is therefore critical to re-engineer the system to take into consideration the activities that regulate the input, process and output of higher education institutions. Higher education constitutes a critical component in the society, but in most cases, does not live up to its own rhetoric (Barnett, 1997). The diverse nature of the coordinating components such as the divisions, discipline and culture, and the blending of capacity, infrastructure and content models a microcosm of the world. Per the words of Emile Durkheim, as referenced by Clark (1986), “it is rare to find an institution which is at once so uniform and so diverse…for it is only living things which can in this way, while fully retaining their identity, bend and adapt themselves to a whole variety of circumstances and environments” (p. xiv).

Adaptability therefore is fundamental in an evolving world, and should be the principle upon which higher education thrives. From a business perspective, the preparation of the products (students) for career should include efforts to equip students for career adaptability (Tolentino, Garcia, Lu, Restubog, Bordia, & Plewa, 2014).

I identify with higher education in the capacity of a growing researcher and doctoral student. My expression of bias is that it could be a waste of time and failure of a system to fulfill products that are not market ready, considering the trends in today’s market. There should be a dissolution of the frozen patterns of thought (Kofman & Senge, 1993), and the institution of collaborations between the market and the higher institutions to ensure that products are tailored to adapt to the demand of the evolving market.

It may not be a surprise if the objectivity of my thoughts are clouded. The reason could be that the administration may not be directly affected by the outcome, especially when the decision makers have little or no background in education (teaching and instruction) -not necessarily educational leadership.

 

Barnett, R. (1997). Higher education: A critical business. McGraw-Hill Education (UK).

Clark, B. R. (1986). The higher education system: Academic organization in cross-national perspective. Univ of California Press.

Kofman, F., & Senge, P. M. (1993). Communities of Commitment: The Heart of Learning Organizations. Organizational Dynamics, 22(2), 4-23.

Tolentino, L. R., Garcia, P. R. J. M., Lu, V. N., Restubog, S. L. D., Bordia, P., & Plewa, C. (2014). Career adaptation: The relation of adaptability to goal orientation, proactive personality, and career optimism. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 84(1), 39-48