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.