Environmental Scan

Environmental Scan

In her article entitled Ethical Leadership and the future of University Governance, Poff (2007) outlines the following phenomena occurring on university campuses:

• The ‘massification’ of university education, with a corollary credential-creep – jobs that used to require Bachelor’s level credentials now require graduate education at the entry level;
• The changing mandate of community colleges to be degree-granting;
• The changing demographics of students, including mature-age students who have competing family, education and workplace obligations;
• The globalization of private for-profit university education;
• The franchising of university degrees within and across nations through sub-contracted degree-granting opportunities;
• The growing divide between those who believe that teachers at universities should also be researchers and those who don’t;
• The establishment of universities without faculty tenure and the complementary belief that tenure is not required for academic freedom;
• The growing requirement for public-private partnerships within public universities;
• The shift in many countries, including Canada, from the general belief that university education is primarily a private good and should be paid for, at least to a greater extent by private individuals;
• The related increase in the cost of education to students as governments in a number of countries decrease educational subsidization and expect students to contribute to their own education through increased tuition and fees; and,
• The increasing number of students who must balance paid labour and studies in order to access education.

Poff, D.C. (2007).Ethical leadership and the future of university governance. Australian Journal of Professional and Applied Ethics, 9(2), 124-132.