Every single time I have conversations with my colleagues from other institutions, it is so apparent that we all operate so differently, sometime unnecessarily. Carnegie Classifications is a commonly used classification which groups institutions in a broad sense. However, deep down, every single institution is different in significant ways that it would be impossible to find two institutions that are similar. So, I find the term “Higher Ed” to be emphasizing similarities way more than highlighting the differences. So in reality, we are the Higher Eds.

I want to clarify that having such differences amongst the institutions is healthy and I would say that the students and parents like it that way generally (not exclusively) for the differences in academic offerings. Of course there are other factors such as alumnae network, residential experience and athletics that are significant differentiators.

But, how many students and parents choose a College because it has the best learning management system or ERP, or the best helpdesk ticketing system or even the best wireless coverage? Or even other campus services (I won’t name them!!)? Why is it that we are reluctant to work together to find a common ground and collaborate on these non-differentiators? It is not as if we don’t collaborate. In fact we are excellent at sharing information and best practices in so many areas. It is just that we are reluctant to take that last step of shared services across institutions.

In this day and age, several of the technologies easily lend themselves to collaboration. What I mean is that with technology moving to the cloud and the ability of technologists to be able to support them from wherever they are geographically are clear advantages on which we can build. Can a few institutions get together and hire a pool of application developers to develop common set of applications used by all institutions (of course with unique identities) regardless of where these developers live? Of course. But we don’t.

There are some services where this is simply not possible because you need these staff members on the ground to help our students, faculty and staff. But even those can be managed through shared services if the institutions are geographically proximal.

There are many reasons why these kinds of collaborations don’t work. The biggest one is the sense of independence and perceived lack of parity amongst the partners. If the group of schools coming together are not equal partners, then this doesn’t work well. The issue of parity is complicated. Schools with better resources may want more say in the matter or the particular personalities are perceived as exerting more influence than the others etc. Secondly, we are creatures of habit and take a lot of comfort in having staff near us, on campus.

Even if there are willing partners, alignment is very hard to achieve on existing services. What I mean by this is, if five institutions want to partner together on an existing initiative (by the way, this is where efficiencies have the biggest impact), you are highly unlikely to have staff vacancies from all five at the same time to be able to share such a service. You need this in order to share a service effectively. This is why you see several successful partnerships in terms of new services, such as Information Security Officer (ISO) type of positions. Each institution feel that they cannot afford a full time ISO and many do not have the need for a full timer. So, it is a perfect alignment of sorts.

But really, how different are we and need to be in terms of how we run our business processes? How often are these driven by individual or business office cultures than institutional priorities, which is providing the best possible education to our students? I also would say that if we are able to come together and improve efficiencies and save money, those savings should go directly to reducing the cost of education.

I understand that these are impractical because of deep rooted cultures and organizational behavior. But that should not mean we should be asking these questions, right?