What are the implications for New Zealand universities? 2

When thinking about alumni and university governance I went back and read the relevant sections of Henry Hansmann's "The Ownership of Enterprise". Hansmann make a couple of interesting observations about university alumni. The first is that (partial) control by alumni makes sense if there is a ranking of universities based on perceived quality of students. Top tier universities would have market power and could charge a very high fee to gain entry into them. A profit maximising university would do this, but a university, at least in part, controlled by its alumni is less likely to do so as the alumni do not want to charge themselves a monopoly price. The alumni may have children or grandchildren going to the university and would want to keep cost of attending the university 'low'  - or at least lower than it otherwise would be. Such an advantage of alumni control is less of an issue here is New Zealand given the amount of government control over universities and their funding.

The second point made by Hansmann relates to the use of "implicit loans" from the university to their students. The markets for loans for the acquisition of human capital are inadequate for obvious reasons. One way around this is for the universities to provide a crude substitute for these loans. Universities supply education to many students at below cost in return for an implicit commitment on the part of the students that they "repay" their loan through donations during their life after university. One result of the government supplying a system of loans, grants or loan guarantees is that there is less, or no, implicit loans to be repaid. This may one reason for the low level of alumni involvement in universities in New Zealand.

The cost to the university of alumni involvement for either of the reasons above is that the alumni will want a share in control of the university. Thus if the universities wish to gain financially even more from their alumni, as they seem to want to do, then they will have to give a larger amount of control over to the alumni.

As noted in the previous post on this subject the alumni can have the incentives and knowledge to make them a sensible class of patrons to give control over to. Not the universities or the government are likely to see it that way!

What are the implications for New Zealand universities?

Over at the Organisations and Markets blog Peter Klein asks Does Strong Alumni Participation Make US Universities Stronger? He writes,

What explains the dominance of the US in elite higher education? Shailendra Mehta offers a novel explanation: the role of alumni. Graduates of US colleges and universities tend to identify strongly with their institutions and care deeply about their school’s reputation and ranking. Only in the US do alumni play such a strong role, not only in financial support (often connected with athletics), but governance.

[N]o group cares more about a university’s prestige than its alumni, who gain or lose esteem as their alma mater’s ranking rises or falls.

Indeed, alumni have the most incentive to donate generously, and to manage the university effectively. Given their intimate knowledge of the university, alumni are also the most effective leaders. Through alumni networks, board members can acquire information quickly and act upon it without delay.

All great universities are nonprofit organizations, created to administer higher education, which benefits society as a whole. But US universities found a way to integrate competition’s benefits into the European concept of nonprofit, or so-called eleemosynary, corporations. The lack of profit does not diminish an alumni-dominated board’s incentive to compete for prestige by, for example, hiring distinguished faculty, accepting meritorious students, and striving for athletic or artistic achievement.

If the Mehta idea is right then should we strength the role that the alumni plays in the governance of New Zealand's universities? Alumni have advantages as major players in university governance. 1) they have an interest in the success of the university and in maintaining its reputation. If the uni's reputation falls so does the value of being a graduate from that uni. 2) they have knowledge about the university and its workings. In areas where expertise is a major component of producing the final product, an inherent knowledge of the area is a positive in terms of getting better organisational outcomes. Alumni can have such knowledge of their institutions.

Of course another group with much the same two attributes are the current academic staff of the university. And what we see in terms of governance is involvement of both groups but should the alumni have greater say?