Why do many universities offer the wrong courses?

One of the most important decisions that universities and other tertiary education institutions need to reach is around which courses to offer. Should they end some courses that are not attracting students? Should they venture into more courses around robotics, cybersecurity, nanotechnology, or additive manufacturing? Despite the importance of these decisions, the approach that universities follow to reach these choices is often inadequate.

To illustrate, in many institutions, the individuals who need to suggest these changes—and often the individuals who approve these changes—are academic staff. Yet, few academic staff have developed the skills to reach these decisions effectively.

Few academic staff, for example, have acquired the capacity to complete a suitable cost-benefit analysis. They either do not apply the necessary techniques, such as sensitivity analyses, or may not even conduct a cost-benefit analysis. Consequently, their estimates of whether the revenue will justify the expenses over time are often misguided.

Likewise, few academic staff can access the data they need to integrate a market analysis with a competitor analysis effectively. So, their knowledge about how many students these courses will attract over time tend to be inaccurate as well

Similarly, few academic staff apply, or even understand, multiple criteria decision making. That is, to decide which courses to offer, institutions need to consider multiple criteria—such as which courses attract the most revenue, which courses are most prestigious, which courses match the strategic values, and which courses are likely to culminate in further study. To reach decisions, institutions need to apply a suite of techniques called multiple criteria decision making, such as analytic hierarchy processing. But few academics apply these methods.

As these considerations imply, many tertiary education institutions may need to transform how they reach decisions about which courses to offer. For instance, to diminish the expenses of market analysis and competitor analysis, coalitions of institutions may need to collaborate with each to conduct these analyses holistically. Then, institutions need to employ specialists in course selection—specialists with knowledge of cost benefit analysis and multiple criteria decision making, for instance—who can help academics select the right courses at the right time.