The Marketing Implications of the University of Texas' Telecampus Decentralization

On Saturday, I was reading an article in the local paper about "Chip" (http://www.centredaily.com/2010/05/15/1978577/layoff-forces-changes-and-grad.html). I've met Chip ... nice guy. Our kids go to pre-school together. Chip graduated this weekend from Penn State, earning his bachelor's degree in organizational leadership by taking courses through Penn State Continuing Education (on-campus and online). He had twenty years of experience in manufacturing and like many other companies, the company he worked for moved operations overseas to tap into less expensive labor and raw materials or was acquired. While I am sure it was a difficult decision for the company, the key factor was clearly cost reduction.

On Friday, I read the Inside Higher Education story of the University of Texas decentralizing its famed UT Telecampus (http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/04/09/telecampus). The campus has been a model for so many other institutions, as it has served many individuals, including the aspiring healthcare worker that can't predict his or her working schedule to the returning adult learner seeking to complete a degree he or she had started a decade earlier. The big issues for me from a marketing standpoint are:

• Can the decentralized marketing activities of many disparate units provide a clear door for the prospective adult learner? Will there be contrasting websites, collateral and other advertising? I've seen fragmentation of the brand, but more importantly, competition for the exact same students by different units of the university.
• Will the cost of marketing increase as each unit that markets their academic college scales up? Most likely, yes, unless you are the Business School and have your well-oiled marketing team in place, but if you are Liberal Arts, I doubt a true integrated marketing function exists. In the least, the stronger programs won't be there to underwrite the weaker programs. The richer will become richer and the weak weaker.
• Will the talent pool or overall abilities to conduct marketing only reach a minimal level? As I have seen with other decentralized marketing efforts, some academic colleges are better suited to do a great job of marketing (as they have a marketing staff devoted to the serving alumni, traditional students and others), while others are not and as a result do not allocate enough or they hire an entry level marketer to do a strategic marketer's job.
• Will the prospect see a better customer experience? Some might argue that they are closer to the product and not two steps removed. However, similar to the last bullet, the student service or enrollment management process may be strong to serve the adult or it might be cobbled together with duct tape and paper clips.

Sounds a bit premature for U of T to be pulling the plug, as the market for distance education is still evolving. We haven't even hit the evolution of Internet and the merging of television, telecommunications and computing. Smartphones are getting smarter ... by not keeping pace with how it interfaces with distance education, are we going to get dumber?

The article suggests that U of T TeleCampus was growing in enrollments, but also had increased costs to the academic units. I say you have to spend money to make money ... get ready to spend more money in a decentralized model to maintain enrollments or get ready to see your enrollments drop because you can't scale up the way you think. A centralized operation, run correctly, is typically a better model in a tight economy. In education, you only decentralize to either force underperforming units to become more profitable (or eliminate them) or to get intimately closer to the customer. You don't do it as a money saving strategy.

Congrats Chip!