The Costs of Efficiency

This paper traces the impacts of technology on education and illustrates the steady progression, always rationalized by the ethos of efficiency, from teacher aids to computer-aided instruction, from data-processes to facilitate record-keeping to omnivorous management information systems. The point is made that at present a management syndrome pervades education planning at all levels. This has created an environment hospitable to the family of techniques related to systems analysis, with its companions and components, cost/benefit measures, program budgeting. Quantitative concepts such as productivity, performance, and accountability have rendered the notion of academic excellence virtually obsolete. After a review of the current state-of-the art, the paper finds that industry-style efficiency may be more costly than beneficial to education

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• The question of efficiency

  Open Access•Karen Gravett, Margaret Bearman et al.•Higher Education Research &…•2026

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