The UK's universities put a huge amount of effort into highlighting their academic strengths, impressive facilities and research achievements. Rightly so – they can set an institution apart from the competition and may even tip the balance in its favour when students are making choices about where to study.
But how many students think about the way a university runs its HR department, manages its finances or purchases its IT equipment? Not many.
These are day-to-day tasks every university carries out, but most students will never notice. And since many of these functions are common across institutions, there's a strong case for exploring how they could be delivered more collaboratively.
The Case for Collaboration in HE
At a time when many universities face some of the most significant financial challenges in recent memory, the call for the sector to do more with less has become almost impossible to ignore.
The 'Collaboration for a Sustainable Future' report, recently commissioned by JISC and produced in partnership with KPMG, underlined the growing need for universities in the UK to explore new ways of working more closely together to deliver better value for students and a more sustainable future for the wider sector.
The report outlined how a shared services model could work in HE – much like the approach some groups of local councils have adopted in recent years, where a central team is responsible for running areas such as HR, payroll and transport across the collective.
There are some great examples of successful shared services in the NHS. NHS Shared Business Services (NHS SBS) , for instance, handles finance, procurement and employment services on behalf of hundreds of hospitals, trusts, community health providers and other services, allowing the individual organisations to focus on delivering frontline care.
Higher education already has UCAS too, which is essentially a collaborative for managing student admissions across the sector.
Looking beyond UK shores, the California State University system is a network of 23 university campuses that collectively educate more than 450,000 students each year. Pennsylvania's State System of Higher Education has also created a 'commonwealth' of universities, state-supported institutions which help to make quality higher education more affordable and better meet students' needs.
So how could our universities operate in a more collaborative way in practice?
What a shared services model in HE might look like
A significant proportion of the UK's higher education institutions now face financial deficits. Collaborating through shared services could be one way for these universities to not only survive, but thrive.
There are some key areas of a university which are a natural fit for a shared services approach.
Instead of each individual university investing separately in similar IT infrastructure, systems, and support services, for example, managing these collectively across the group could result in significant cost savings through bulk buying and shared expertise. It would also reduce administration and free staff to spend more time on tasks that have a direct impact on students’ experience and outcomes.
Of course, not all aspects of higher education are suitable for this collaborative way of working. However, when tackling the complex issue of what makes an institution unique, it can be helpful to ask specific questions to identify where shared services might be beneficial, including:
- Which operational areas have little or no direct impact on students' experience?
- Which functions are expensive or inefficient to run alone, but could be cheaper if shared?
- Where could the institution benefit most from economies of scale and more standard ways of working?
Universities have a critical role to play in improving outcomes for students. But this doesn't mean every institution needs to run everything in-house.
The recognition and celebration of institutional autonomy and individual cultures is at the heart of the UK's higher education sector. This can be preserved while exploring the opportunities that exist to share services.
The Bigger Picture
By working together to explore which services could be shared, universities can focus more of their time and effort on meeting students' needs.
Universities are at a crossroads with clear options to consider – continue to operate as separate, standalone organisations, with all that entails, or come together to build a more resilient and efficient higher education sector which is free to focus on the future.
Ellucian has supported more than 1,000 institutions educating over 10 million students to work more collaboratively. For further insights on this topic, download the 'Transforming Higher Education Through Systemization' white paper.
