OUTSOURCING OF SERVICES IN HIGHER EDUCATION: IS IT WORTH EXPLORING?

Abstract

This paper examines the issue of outsourcing in higher education. For decades, colleges and universities have been able to easily and comfortably provide the needed and highly demanded quality education through financial help and support from public funds, state grants, funding for research, private organizations, and alumni. However, a slowing increasing economy, declining students' enrollments, state budget cuts, decreased funding for research, and rapid increasing costs of higher education have led many colleges and universities into extensive financial difficulties. In most colleges and universities' tuition is drastically on the rise while the quality of services and teaching offered are on the edge. Thus, to remain competitive, improve services, and still increase enrollments, many institutions of higher education have been turning to several management approaches, including outsourcing. The most popular outsourced services are food services (74.6%), vending (63.2%), bookstore operations (45.7%), custodial services (45%), maintenance (35.9%), security (24,2%), and laundry services (20.6%) (Agron, 2002). However, the recent financial pressures have led many institutions to outsource additional campus functions such as facility management, administrative services such as payroll, transportation, healthcare, and many more. This study will primarily focus on the level of satisfaction with outsourcing as reported by leader of the Maryland, North Carolina and Virginia's private and public four-year institutions of higher education. The study Will also (1) investigate processes employed when implementing outsourcing and will outline the degree to which outsourcing is being used at different size and environment of the selected four-year institutions of all three states mentioned above; (2) estimate the reasons given by respondents for outsourcing; and finally (3) analyze the difference observed in each state according to the responses received. The survey instrument used for study was emailed to a total number of 138 presidents and/or vice-presidents of all private and public schools in the states of Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia. From the 138 e-mails sent out, a total of 62 surveys were returned (44.9%). We are still in the process of doing the descriptive statistics and will be able to present the results at the conference.

Keywords: Budgeting, Higher education, Outsourcing

For full Paper: fmscresearch@sjp.ac.lk