California Higher Edu Master Plan-When is Outsourcing Good? Bad?

Education has an important function in society. It helps feed our industries, governments, and intellectual capital by developing highly skilled individuals that can succeed on the international market. Outsourcing services and learning do have benefits but comes with a few caveats. As with all outsourcing, it is important to keep a few things in mind that include performance, cost, integration, and decision making.

Outsourcing should enhance the current abilities of public institutions at a cheaper price. Higher education has a cost and when we outsource it much be to a more innovative, flexible, and cost-effective partner. If the outsourcing options cannot consistently outperform government in effectiveness and cost it should be reconsidered.

Outsourcing options should be well integrated into the overall government system. Sometimes entities outsource, and the services become disjointed level thousands unable to fully utilize the system due to lack of knowledge, gaps in services, and ineffective integration plans. The way public universities and outsourcing services integrate together should be as seamless as possible.

Core processes must be held by the University. Outsourcing should be an enhancement to core processes not making business decisions over those main processes. The mission and core decision-making processes are to be held by the public institution in order to ensure control over the services.

Outsourcing has possibilities to save money and improve services. It doesn't always do this as sometimes the management of such systems is ineffective. Outsourcing public institutions requires deep thought and adequate strategic planning before implementation. Vendors should enhance current capacities through superior performance when compared to keeping the service in-house, should be cost effective, well-integrated, and should be reliant on the main entity and the mission of the public institution.