It is tempting to interpret the above statement as ‘academese’ for "We can no longer afford to schedule no classes on Friday afternoon and go to the pub instead. What will our foreign visitors think? " However, it does raise two main areas of serious concern to educators.²

Firstly, why are the management goals of greater business efficiency and more effective marketing desirable for institutions involved in International Education? Some would argue that the appropriate goals for institutions of learning should be framed in educational terms. Yet, whatever the phrasing, the right management practices will aim at achieving an institution’s educational mission. The practices of efficiency and marketing relate directly to an organisation’s ability to deliver education, in other words, to fulfill its mission as effectively as possible. In the future, institutions will need to know who their constituents are, what they want and how to deliver it. This is what marketing involves.

Secondly, what are the traditional practices of tertiary or university educators and how do they relate to attaining these goals? Traditional practices of educators have been negatively characterized in ways similar to those expressed by the President of Ohio University, Charles J. Ping, who is quoted as saying that instead of wrestling with a world taking on new forms, academic effort often seeks to preserve, defend and react.³ Coldrake and Stedman are critical of the inflexibility of hiring and promotional practices, for example, of Australian institutions and present an argument for improvements in university governance and management. They present a damning picture of a sexist and elitist group of privileged professionals, bent on protecting that privilege in the name of collegiality, to the exclusion of a lower-class of teaching lackies.⁴

While these organisational problems and issues of justice continue to be addressed, in an ever-changing, Australian institutions and educators have already proven themselves capable of dramatic and on-going change. Some elements of teaching and professional practice have already been set aside, along with the fordigraph machine, slide rule and three term year. Others have been given new foci and taken on new forms. The Higher Education Report for the 1999 to 2001 Triennium is a litany of changes which are already occurring in higher education: problem-based and competence-oriented curricula and assessessment; resource-based learning; new admissions practices; internationalisation; programs for professional development; tailoring teaching and research programs to particular regional needs; collaboration with other institutions, with the vocational education and training sector and with industry; the application of information technology to teaching and learning and administrative services; and concentration of research and research training into areas of strength.⁵

A diversity of educational practices is evolving, but at the same time there is a need for continuation of many educational traditions. The future for education in the competitive global environment is one of increasing differentiation.⁶ Not all providers of education will offer the same services. Some will specialize in developing new and innovative content, others on new modes of delivery of that content, others still on continuing traditions of liberal and humanistic education. In a differentiated industry there is not only room for them all, but a demand for diversity.⁷

So that the established higher education institutions are not left serving the less-profitable traditional undergraduate market, while new entrants cater to the other more profitable segments, it is imperative that they look to competing in the new segmented market and are engaged in active marketing practices.⁸ As Stuart and others point out, this is not just a challenge, but also an opportunity.

All institutions of higher education in Australia are involved in International Education. In the last two decades there has been a choreographed shift from an aid view to a trade view and now to an internationalisation view of international education and its role in Australia’s foreign policy.⁹

The major factors affecting change in Australian institutions are to a great degree the same as those in the US, UK and around the globe:

• Changes in educational relationships, due to globalisation and its concomitant changes in communication and technology and through changes in funding;
• Corporatisation and changes in management practices, due to the instrumentalist policies of governments using education as a tool for social change;
• Mass customisation in post-Fordist economies requiring mass access to higher education and concomitant growth in demand for new kinds of education in continuous and professional learning, as well as vocational training;
• and increased competition because of the three other factors.

How institutions react to these forces differs, because of mitigating internal and domestic factors, so that organisational solutions in one institution are not necessarily appropriate in another.

• Technological change is having an impact on the teaching and learning within our institutions and facilitates the dispersal of knowledge outside the institution and within learning networks, where teachers become not only instructors in technology and content, but also facilitators and mediators. Education is communication, and the formerly simple dyad relationship between teacher and student, or even the triangular relationship of subject content, teacher and student and how they communicate, have all changed through the introduction of new communications media into the educational enterprise.¹⁰ It could even be argued that, with the use of video, text and computer dispersed education, the classroom and the teacher become redundant, especially for motivated adult learners. In any case, the electronic medium facilitates greater learner control. Peer relationships can be fostered and the student - teacher relationship transformed in a totally new dynamic.¹¹
• New technology enabling mass delivery of courses contributes to the changing demography of the learners. People in mid-career, full-time work, at home with small children, people from minority populations and with disabilities can have access to educational programs which are flexible in time and space and so open up non-traditional constituencies for institutions of higher education. Learner pathways have changed. University graduates enrol in community college courses in the U.S. to get both hard and soft professional skills. The demand from the older, professional population for on-going education is a challenge, which cannot be met through traditional classroom courses alone. The cost is prohibitive and the medium not always appropriate. High tech solutions can offer significant cost savings when on large scale and convenience and flexibility for a new kind of student.¹²

Marketing can be defined as "a philosophy through which institutions consider, debate and clarify their underlying principles and purposes to meet the needs of their clients."¹³ Sound marketing practice requires that in order to discern and meet the needs of these different kinds of learners, courses be customised to meet those needs. The kinds of courses which the ‘global consumer’is demanding are ‘flexible, adaptable, portable and interactive’.¹⁴

• The old gift relationship between teacher and student will always find a place in education, but through changes in funding, relationships are changing between the institution and its constituents. With the staged introduction of student fees, the student is perceived more and more as the client, rather than the beneficiary of education. Sometimes the client is not the student, but their employer or another government body which provides funds for a course of study.¹⁵ Because education is now student-centred more emphasis is being placed on performance evaluation to improve standards of teaching, but until quality of teaching and not research is a criterion for promotion there will be little incentive for academics to make use of the resources and incentives provided by their institutions and the federal government.¹⁶

Advertising and promotion without accompanying improvements in course and service delivery can lead to strong negative reactions and may not actually attract the right students. With market-oriented institutional planning, marketing is recognised as much more than promotion, it includes quality control and performance evaluations. Moreover these issues cannot be settled until more fundamental issues are resolved, such as mission.¹⁷

What is the mission of our higher education sector? It is now no longer enough for just the leadership to have access to higher education, but the whole of society.¹⁸

"In the twenty-first century knowledge will be the most important currency of all. If Australia is to prosper in this new environment, and to continue to be a vibrant, open and inclusive society, we must also become a learning society" – opening observation of the recent West Report Executive Summary.¹⁹

In Britain the mission is described thus: "Learning is the key to prosperity - for each of us as individuals, as well as for the nation as a whole. Investment in human capital will be the foundation of success in the knowledge-based global economy of the twenty-first century. This is why the Government has put learning at the heart of its ambition."²⁰ "Increasing opportunities for people to learn and widening access are at the heart of this Government’s policies for creating a learning society".²¹ This statement also reflects the nature of education as both a private and a common good.

The above statements demonstrate a major shift of the last few decades towards instrumentality in the perceived role of higher education. Governments use higher education as a tool to implement social and economic reform, both increased access and the creation of human capital. Australia can no longer afford a university sector that exists solely for the intellectual edification of the few and the professional preparation of the elite.²²

Tertiary education in Australia is still largely in the public sector, and as such is subject to the same sort of government policies and fiscal restraints as other arms of government. When making decisions about investing national resources in education, governments have to consider that the returns are much higher in the primary and secondary sectors.²³ The tertiary sector, however, has the ability to access other sources of funding, as institutions in the US had done for many years.²⁴ The tertiary sector had to be expanded rapidly, and then made to look for supplementary sources for income, as in a time of economic belt-tightening the government would not commit to carrying the cost of the expanded sector.²⁵

In the 80’s and 90’s Australia saw a systematic corporatisation and commercialisation of its public sector institutions, with the avowed purposes of giving Australians value for their public purse dollar and reducing the government deficit.²⁶ In a culture of economic rationalism and post-Fordist economics, the tertiary education sector was seen as vital to the future growth of Australia, the ‘Clever Country’, in the fast-growing Asian economic region. Australian colleges of higher education were herded together into large universities and set in competition with the older more established ones, such as Melbourne University and the University of NSW.

With a blurring of their missions, universities and colleges of TAFE became part of the same mega-ministry, with the same goals: to meet the economic challenges facing Australia by producing an educated and skilled workforce. Not only the vocational training sector but also the universities were now in the business of ‘production’, looking to business for organisational models.

The collegial models of decision-making in our universities are unsuitable for mass education systems and, as Marginson puts it "rest(s) on select groups of educators whose objectives are status rewards and professional monopoly". Unionists, even of Harvard, point out "We can’t eat prestige".²⁷ Nor is there any way of preserving a monopoly by such a small group in this competitive environment. The collegial management practices involve "extensive debate, endless rounds of consultation, detailed scrutiny by unwieldy committees and lengthy implementation schedules".²⁸

Variations on the managerial style of organisation may be more suitable for tertiary institutions in the present competitive environment than is the old-style collegial model. Considine explains that integration means centralisation of control and uniformity of purpose. It’s main aim is to avoid duplication and waste, but one side-effect is a lack of ‘local’ innovation and decision making, the problem he describes is one where local management has control over resources, but not policy.²⁹ Unity of purpose is perhaps a higher priority than local policy control, if institutions are going to be able to change effectively to meet the demands being made of them.

Mass customisation – How is it funded?

The imperative from the point of view of national economic policy is to have a tertiary education sector that can meet the needs of both the masses and the individual. This requires mass customisation.

To meet the growing needs for expansion and diversification into alternative modes of delivery, especially where distance or ‘distributed’ education is concerned, requires large amounts of capital investment.³⁰ In the United Kingdom, under a previous Labour government, the issue of how to educate a growing number of people (from diverse backgrounds) in order to form the new skilled and educated workforce, was addressed by the establishment of the public Open University. Economies of scale and the use of mixes of technology mean that the cost of delivering a course to the average student is reduced to only $350, which is considerably less than that of delivering a traditional class room course.³¹

In the US, on the other hand, the response to the growing urgency of providing a hugely expanded number of places in higher education has been met in a piece-meal way by individual institutions and business looking at opportunities in the highly competitive US environment.³² Private businesses, such as Jones International, compete with traditional providers to launch into the new realm of distance delivery and computer mediated courses. Institutions have gone into partnerships with businesses such as IBM and AT&T to raise capital and get the necessary expertise.³³ This new relationship between business and educational institutions is not limited to the US. Universities in England and Australia are seeking out businesses as clients and as venture partners.

While one of the Open University’s largest programs is that of teacher education, which would qualify as a ‘ common good’, the area in which the business-school collaborations are most obvious is in the area of providing courses in business and information technology, which fall into the ‘private good’ category.³⁴

This would suggest that the kind of courses (private or common good)to be delivered would to some extent determine the source of funding, or the kind of partnerships which will arise. As education is a mix of market and non-market production and produces both common and private goods, it can never be completely market driven. Government or community funding in some form will always need to be part of the equation. In Australia we have looked to international education as an extra source of private funding and a way of expanding our small domestic market.

Market competition for Australia’s education sector is increasing in the Asian region. Projections were that Australia’s share of the international market would grow from 3.3% in 1994 to 5% by the year 2000.³⁵

Not all of this education is provided on-shore, some of it delivered through twinning, through distance and through partnering arrangements. Most of it is provided in the region. However, in order to maintain their share in the regional education market, Australian institutions are going to have to compete with Singapore which sees itself as the ‘Boston of the East’, with institutions mirroring MIT and Harvard, attracting world-class academics and the top creative minds. In order to do this Singapore is restructuring and refocusing its entire education system.³⁶ Australian higher education must continue to internationalise, to make its curricula relevant to the needs of the region, to put in place systems of quality assurance and assessment that are internationally recognisable and to engage in international intellectual exchange and collaborative research. Universities have always been international in character, so this is an extension of traditional practice, but for technical and vocational training it requires a clear shift of focus, from national to international.

It is likely that competition will continue to lead to collaboration and the formations of consortia, along the lines of Australian Open Learning and Ballarat’s partnership with IBM, where institutions work together to develop and deliver educational products. Universities will pool resources to compete internationally.

Australia has a strategic advantage in that English, the language of instruction, is the language in which most research is published and is the language in which most international interactions, academic and economic, take place. Yet, without effective marketing strategies Australia could well find its institutions increasingly irrelevant and will not attract foreign income. Of even more concern is a situation where, despite large barriers to foreign competion, Australia will have to admit competitors from overseas into the domestic market.³⁷

Apart from international competition, legislators hoped also to encourage fiscal responsibility and efficiency through domestic competition. TAFE was restructured into regional colleges to compete with each other; changing names and duplicating administrative structures, incorporating marketing divisions and implementing ‘flexible’ human resource policies based on short-term employment contracts and large numbers of untenured part-time staff. The need to be directly responsive to the needs of employers in the area of training meant that the changes within this sector were particularly swift and severe. The complex issue of a more flexible workforce in higher education is not going to be resolved in the near future, but there must be a variety of solutions, dependant on the nature of different enterprises.

Having looked at the major external factors affecting change, we can now examine how different instiutions have reacted. As institutions continue to assess their own areas of strength and turn their efforts towards marketing and improving these areas, there is emerging a new, sometimes parallel structure to the one of departments, of centres of research within universities. These are teams of academics and administrators, working together on a problem-based approach, across disciplines, across institutional boundaries and across national boundaries. These teams can work together with government or business or other stakeholders to work on concrete problems such as population control, environment and health issues. In response to Brett’s concern about a loss of collegiality under the new competitive ethos it should be pointed out that these new working teams are providing educators with a new structure for collegial exchange and enterprise, and can be a far better environment for creativity and thought for some academics than being isolated as the one specialist in a discipline-based departmental structure.³⁸

Since the introduction of student tuition fees in Australia, state-owned institutions have faced competition from private ones. These institutions focus exclusively on courses which are profitable and therefore threaten to undermine these new sources of income to universities and TAFE colleges. TAFE faces stiff competition from private secretarial colleges cum language and commerce institutes, and from private schools of management and business. The private sector is in direct competition for those areas, English language, business/management and continuing education (which universities have also been cultivating as sources of extra revenue). The growth of information technology has seen a proliferation of competing technology-related courses in all three kinds of institutions and is providing a mix of media for course delivery which can be cheaper than traditional modes of delivery and is certainly more flexible.

The competition therefore is not confined to one aspect of the educational enterprise, but now also takes the form of challenges to both traditional course content and traditional modes of delivery. Cunningham points out, as new entrants into education are addressing the needs of the continuing and professional education sector (which are more profitable) it is possible that the state universities will end up providing the less-profitable traditional undergraduate courses. In response to this challenge, some institutions have set up almost completely separate corporate structures to deal with the business-university interface (such as Melbourne University Private or Deakin Australia) and others integrate internationalism and marketing practices into their entire structure (as has Monash).³⁹ New options for teaching and research practice by no means exclude those traditional practices which have a good track record of providing something that learners and society perceive as valuable; rather they are catering to new needs and new market sectors.

The question remains to be answered as to what extent market forces can be permitted to determine the provision of education in the tertiary sector. The government has an agenda to increase access to tertiary education and therefore has an interest in not relying solely on market-forces, but rather continuing to support tertiary education financially and legislatively.

Even in a non-market-driven environment, Harvey and Busher point out, that marketing is actually an ethical imperative even for charities and non profit organisations. It is important to identify beneficiaries’ and clients’ needs as accurately as possible to avoid wastage of scarce resources. In this new highly competitive environment, effective marketing and business efficiency are now very much the goals of Australian tertiary institutions, to enhance their reputations,⁴⁰ to raise sufficient funds and to maximise the benefits of those funds for the good of the whole institution.

Bradmore goes so far as to say that an organisation must be able to cut out of its operations any activity or expense that adds unnecessarily to its cost, while at the same time building value in terms of increasing the appeal its offering has to its customers. It is up to the public and politicians, and to university management, not to academics, to decide to what extent they will support ‘non-essential’ activity. These decisions should be made on the basis of their value to the community at large or their ‘common’ good.

The statement that the traditional practices of educators need to be set aside is in part true. Certain inflexibilities in structure and organisation need to be overcome. Hopefully the tensions between the needs of educators to be autonomous and yet accountable, to be flexible and yet enjoy job-security, will be creative ones.

In the emerging more-differentiated industry, there will remain a demand for prestige education as well as the growing demand for completely job-skill oriented courses alongside courses in personal development and continuing professional education. There will always be a place for institutions which focus on high quality research and the development of new knowledge.⁴¹

Long term viability of institutions depends on their ability to provide the learner with an education at a price the state, the employer or the individual are able to afford, and which meets their changing needs. Effective marketing means being able to discern these needs. Efficiency will increase the sector’s capacity to meet them; to provide the best service with the resources available through the application of new technologies, new management, quality assurance, new funding and delivery structures and new collaborative relationships. The challenge will always be to match these to the educational mission of the institutions.

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