دانلود رایگان مقاله رقابت و استراتژی در آموزش عالی

Abstract

Like several other nonprofit and for-profitindustries,the higher education sector has been subject to a series of fundamental challenges in the past decade. Education used to be considered a public good, provided by nonprofit organizations that were unexposed to market pressure and had clear societal missions. Now, education is becoming a global service delivered by quasi-companies in an ever-more complex and competitive knowledge marketplace. To cope with these challenges, higher education institutions need an appropriate strategy, a necessity reflected in numerous calls for research on strategy in the higher education sector. This article’s purpose is to contribute to this discussion by providing prescriptive guidance to higher education managers and policy makers. To this end, it proposes a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis illustrating eight key trends that will impact higher education and academia in the short-to-medium term. Drawing from these trends, three core challenges are identified that higher education institutions will face and that have fundamental implications for research and practice: (1) the need to enhance prestige and market share; (2) the need to embrace an entrepreneurial mindset; and (3) the need to expand interactions and value co-creation with key stakeholders.

3.3. Core challenge

3: Expand links and interactions, and value co-creation Addressing the third core challenge (i.e., expanding links and interactions, and valuing co-creation with key stakeholders with a specific focus on alumni) implies complete renewal and reshaping of relationships with various partners and expansion of the number of touch points in these relationships. Indeed, the European Commission (2013) recommends that HE institutions should strengthen network relationships as a means ofincreasing universities’ access to resources and fostering the linkage between universities and industry entities and their ability to cocreate knowledge or to offer joint programs and opportunities for interdisciplinary research. We suggest that the capacity of an HE institution to address this challenge is highly dependent on the extent to which it incorporates current information technologies into its relationships with various stakeholders. Web 2.0 and social media platforms (Kaplan, 2012; Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010) have been widely adopted by the public. These technologies have become highly influential in the selection processes of prospective students seeking universities and of corporations looking for strategic partners. Moreover, students expect the university experience to reflect the environment to which they are accustomed–—an environment that is currently characterized by a high degree of participative collaboration. Accordingly, as public service organizations, HE institutions should adopt a student-centric perspective and ensure that they respond to these expectations, not only by adding technologies to current pedagogies and practice (indeed, some professors have begun to timidly incorporate video and other media in their lectures) but also by completely reshaping current practices to incorporate interaction and co-learning.