The typical college or university of the '90s faces an unprecedented array of challenges. Accelerating costs, declining enrollment, discontented faculty, indifferent alumni, and disenchanted donors threaten the stability of most institutions. For high-cost institutions without a distinctive image, the issue is not stability but survival.
Many schools misdiagnose the problem, which results in misdirected solutions.
This is not to say that institutions are ignoring strategies to improve overall performance. Use of the quality improvement techniques of Deming, Crosby, Juran, et al has been well chronicled in the higher education literature. However, given the functional differences between the academic culture and the industrial or corporate culture, also well documented in the literature, the failure of these strategies to impact higher education performance is predictable. During the past half-century, higher education has grown increasingly more complex, much like society at large. Colleges and universities, following the models established by industrial enterprises, have responded by moving to decentralized profit-center concepts.