Everything a University Does Can Be Done in Half the Time for Half the Cost

When I was a business executive and CEO in the transportation and technology sector, we used a concept called “lean thinking.” This concept is a manufacturing philosophy developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Professor Jim Womack, who has been called the “Godfather of Lean,” a nickname that stemmed from his work as a consultant to the Japanese automobile industry. While bringing the industry back to the United States, Womack helped transform our automotive industry into one of the best in the world. “Lean thinking” means always looking for ways to reduce waste and improve quality while continuously lowering costs. It particularly focuses on time management and doing things faster than you thought possible. This takes discipline and leadership, but the results can be astonishing.

Why not apply lean management methods to our universities?

The U.S. bachelor’s degree takes students four years to complete. It can easily be done in three years, or even two if you include the summer semesters. The same goes for graduate professional degrees.  The MBA can be finished in one year. The J.D. degree can easily be done in two years or even one full year. The M.P.P. is usually a two-year graduate track, but it is antiquated and will be decommissioned. That leaves the medical degree or M.D. There is nothing sacrosanct about it either, and even New York University (NYU) has cut it down to three years. With the right undergraduate preparation and focus, it can be done in two years, getting doctors where they need to be—working. Indeed, paralegals in law and nurse practitioners in medicine can do at least 50 percent of what their fully credentialed superiors do, and they can do so for a fraction of the cost. In business, the undergrad business major from schools like the University of Texas McCombs School and many others are very competitive, and they are more efficient programs for gaining technical skills like financial accounting.

Then there’s the Ph.D. In the United Kingdom, it’s a three-year program. It’s twice as long in the United States, and in the Humanities, it is not unusual to see a candidate spend up to eight years.

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The U.S. is particularly plagued with academic inflation compared with its counterparts in most of the world. In law, for example, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America train their lawyers in an accelerated 3-year undergraduate degree format called the LL.B or bachelor of law. In business, France’s INSEAD business school offers the MBA in a 9-month track.

The entire undergraduate degree has also been put fundamentally into question by our numerous junior colleges that offer a 2-year associate’s degree. Many of these can offer tremendous value to education, prompting the question: why do students need an additional two years of time and expense?

This curriculum inflation stems from various causes and leads to several classic management challenges, particularly regarding efficiency. The concept of the “lean enterprise”—widely embraced across industries to reduce waste and enhance quality—remains virtually absent in both higher and secondary education. Consider this: we spend eight years in elementary school, four years in secondary school, another four years in college, and then up to three or more years for graduate professional training—double that for a doctorate. This timeline is a staggering acknowledgment of educational inefficiency, waste, and cost.

In all major industries, including automotive, energy, technology, and consumer goods, the management motto is “faster, better, cheaper.” Why is this not applied to our universities? The largest source of resistance is the faculty. They have also “tiered” the wage labor pool by using adjuncts and graduate students to conduct classes at a fraction of the cost to protect their own economics. Because university administration is drawn from this same faculty academic pool, they are conflicted in making changes. In the meantime, U.S. student debt now tops two trillion dollars, and half of that amount, and growing, is in some form of financial arrears, default, or restructuring.

Lean business thinking can bring enormous benefits to education because it forces us to ask basic questions about how we do things, what they cost, and how to improve “throughput.” Because education, at an institutional level, is very much like manufacturing, the throughput concept is relevant and helpful in understanding education production, cost, and efficiency.

This doesn’t imply that education is a factory process. Instead, it emphasizes that the way we use institutions—i.e., corporations—referred to as “universities” must be structured and managed as the operational organizations they inherently are. That means that you must measure and control time, resources, cost, and quality. Education still continues long after one graduates. Indeed, the faster you get in and out of college or graduate school, the faster you get to the real education: working. This means applying and activating the knowledge you acquired in school.

“Lean Education” is a classic win-win for all parties, but to get it started and make the initial tough decisions, our university administration must be made up of more business-savvy professionals and leaders. These individuals must be tested with more carefully selected “outsiders” to break bad university habits and openly question higher education’s old assumptions.

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Some say that students shouldn’t be rushed. They aren’t ready to graduate at a younger age or be worked faster. Faculty also resist being pushed because they feel that “research” requires unstructured work. I mostly disagree with this view. The students are more than ready and more than capable of doing more, doing it faster, and taking on more responsibility sooner.

Some perspective may help. Air Force B17 bomber pilots, commanders, and group leaders in WWII were 19 to 21 years old. Commercial airline pilots are first licensed at age 18. By age 21, our undergraduate colleges award a B.S. degree in aerospace, chemical, electrical, mechanical, molecular, nuclear, and petroleum engineering, qualifying graduates for the PE designation—the engineering equivalent of the Bar license—and then go on to build hypersonic rockets, nuclear power plants, medical surgical robots, nano-particulate polymer coatings, steel bridges, 50-story towers, high-speed magnetic trains, water treatment plants, military computer code, communications satellites, and genetic crop farms.

The minimum recruitment age for all combat branches of the U.S. military is 17. At age 18, you can begin qualifications for Army Warrant Officer training to operate turbine attack helicopter aircraft in battle, at night, in the desert, and in mountainous regions with electronic warfare controls, high-caliber machine guns, and guided rockets. In music, youth is the very basis of virtuoso achievement. Violinist Hillary Hahn was accepted into the Curtis Institute at age 10 and could already play the Bach Partitas from memory.

Faster, Better, Cheaper. That is the New Year’s Resolution for higher education.

(Readers may enjoy an opinion I wrote on this subject in relation to the University of Chicago, in the Financial Times: ‘Overhaul’ Likely to Mean Business as Usual at the University of Chicago.)

Image by jirsak — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 165800510