Values

Documents/PESC/Values

Education is a true American value that should be available and affordable for all. We as a society hold near and dear to our hearts that every American is entitled to a good education. We struggle to make that education as affordable as possible without regulating or intruding too deeply into the autonomy of higher education.

Education is a true American industry that includes the private sector. Business stakeholders provide high quality products and services and expect, like in any business line, a profitable margin for providing those products and services.

Organizations compete to attract better students, faculty, and/or funding. Competition can hinder collaboration as to protect competitive edge, openness is not always encouraged.

A unified education system requires collaboration. Stakeholders must work together in a common mission and purpose to ensure equal opportunity and service. Tradition and competition sometimes hinder collaboration.

Complexity commonly leads to unintended consequences. The complexity dealing with data and application incompatibilities is usually rooted in the methodology an organization employs in a specific sector or business process. Connecting to other sectors, other stakeholders or other applications is not incorporated in development plans. So rather than one system being able to snap or plug into another, a single-use and very cumbersome connector is built between systems. The unintended consequence is lack of support for analytics, longitudinal studies, and other forms of interchange.

We accept and condone high IT costs by allowing them year after year. The historical use of information technology exaggerates costs by taxing institutions and stakeholders when data movement, reporting and interfaces are required across or between systems. The expenditures on information technology across education is spent locally by schools and institutions and departments, with little oversight and coordination. One can’t build a city without a city plan, codes and enforcement. Data systems can’t work together if expenditures are not managed to foster the goals of interoperability and interchange.

Unique nuances of certain institutions require customized integrations and implementations, sometimes very costly. As institutions struggle with keeping up with emerging technologies and with ensuring appropriate enrollment, single-use turnkey solutions seem the best approach.

Autonomy is often a muse for keeping the status quo. The proprietary designs and deployment are reinforced by “not invented here” motivations. Innovations are incremental and generally proprietary, reinforcing motivations to defend isolation and separation of systems and the management of data. Also, the governance of academic institutions complicates how systems are viewed inside and across the education ecosystem. Maintaining the status quo in data management is inefficient and ineffective use of the annual investment society makes in education data systems.