Last week, I mentioned in this post a story about investment plan discussions at WITT. WITT was facing a funding cut that was $0.55m higher than expected and the Council was considering asking for an extra $0.3m (taking the extra cuts to $0.25m) or a Plan B of other funding alternatives to “prove their competence”. “Mary” made the following comment on the post.

I wondered what you thought of the logic used in the WITT discussion — in particular the suggestion that they should avoid ” finding an underperforming student programme and dumping it, or getting more international students” and instead ask the TEC to find an extra $300,000. In the current environment that probably means something like 40 or 50 kids being told they can’t get into university this coming year. Does that make keeping an underperforming course seem OK?

I think there are interesting moral and management questions in this situation. As a starting point, the WITT Council and management are understandably seeking to maximise the resources available to them to deliver education, while the TEC will make the final decision about whether to put funds into WITT or some other TEO, such as a university.

In terms of WITT’s decision-making, they do need to pursue all angles to balance the books. But I don’t think there’s a clear decision to be made here of dropping a poorly performing programme or just taking on a few more international students. WITT has been micromanaged by people for years and I’m sure they don’t have any programmes with 10% completion rates or no relevance to their region. Rather, I’d expect that any programme they target will simply be the lowest performer they have, rather than a programme that fails on some global quality scale (although such a global scale might exist next week when performance data is released). Similarly with international students, their numbers will be limited by their marketing resources and market position, rather than just turning the tap on or off. I think the options discussed by them are the things that you would do when you are running a deficit, rather than necessarily being the next obvious management decision. I’m not sure they face an imperative to make those cuts until they don’t have the funds to offer them – although more transparency in allocation of resources would be a good thing.

In terms of the TEC’s decision-making, I’m sure they will face pressure to increase university EFTS, but they have set funding by subsector according to some internal determination and they will probably operate within those bounds. Whether they should shift funds to universities is another matter and one about which I’m not convinced. Universities generate a lot of press, but I’d want to see what the marginal return was for different student groups before increasing any subsector’s funding.

What do you think about the challenges in this situation for WITT and TEC?