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Considering higher ed as an industry
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“The idea is to begin to think as an industry, not as 22 separate colleges and universities.”
UB’s Regional Institute is in the midst of a project that is looking at higher education in Western New York as a business enterprise and what it can do to better leverage itself as a growing industry in the region, the UB Council learned at its meeting on June 1.
Kathryn Foster, director of the Regional Institute, briefed council members on “Better by Degrees,” a project of the Western New York Higher Education Consortium. The consortium, founded 40 years ago, includes the presidents of the 22 universities and colleges in Western New York and aims to advance the educational and administrative welfare and efficiency of its members.
The consortium, which for the most part had played a low-key role in the region, recently decided under new leadership to take a more activist role, Foster said. The Regional Institute was brought in, she said, to “clarify the goals and prepare a proposal for what it is that higher education could be as an industry—we’re a growing industry in a regional economy that doesn’t have many growing industries, so perhaps there’s more leverage we could have.”
The objective of the first phase of the project, funded with $150,000 from the John R. Oishei Foundation, was to determine the role of higher education in the regional economy, Foster said.
From January through October 2008, the institute researched several questions: What is higher education and its impact on the region? What was the story it was telling: its image, sense of place and what it was doing in the region. And how could it better leverage its partnerships to have a more vital role in Western New York.
Foster outlined the initial findings:
• There is a wide variation among institutions in the region, ranging from two-year colleges to one major research university.
• Buffalo is a college town. A comparison of mid-sized metropolitan regions shows that Buffalo ranks at the top—alongside Raleigh-Durham and Rochester—in number of students in the region, with seven students per 100 population.
• The economic impact of the 22 institutions is $3.2 billion—UB represents $1.6 billion of the total—20 times greater than major arts and cultural organizations and twice as great as the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. The institutions generate 32,000 jobs—one-third of those at UB—and pay $122 million in local and state taxes.
• Of the 105,000 students in the region, about 28 percent come from outside the area—“bringing their tuition, their energy, ideas and their spending on rent, food and entertainment,” Foster said.
• Of the 22,469 degrees conferred at the institutions in a recent year, nearly half were bachelor’s degrees, and 30 percent were master’s, doctoral and first professional degrees—most coming from UB. Nearly a quarter of all degrees were granted in the life sciences or health fields, which, Foster said, represents the knowledge economy that is driving an important sector of the regional economy.
• Institutions in the region are oversupplying graduates for jobs as librarians, electrical engineers, architects and teachers. There are more openings than graduates for employment, recruitment and placement specialists; rehabilitation counselors; and computer programmers, to name a few.
• An audit of the institutions’ Web sites found individualized sites, representing the character of each institution.
The Regional Institute has prepared a prototype of a Western New York higher education Web site, Foster noted. Geared toward parents, prospective students and guidance counselors, the site, which is not yet live, offers information for students looking to find a college in the area based on a major. Each institution has its own profile page “in which it can boast or brag or put itself forward within a template that collectivizes the experience of being in higher education in Western New York,” she said.
The site could be expanded to include connections to business and industry, Foster added, noting it could advertise internships and job exchanges, and be a link to high schools and government entities that want interact with the institutions. “There are more opportunities here. This is just the beginning.
“The idea is to begin to think as an industry, not as 22 separate colleges and universities,” she said.
Foster noted that the Oishei Foundation has funded phase 2 of the project, a three-year effort that will include hiring an executive director to run the project on a daily basis, developing and implementing a marketing campaign, expanding and activating the Web site, conducting some additional research and undertaking joint efforts to serve multiple higher education audiences.
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