Demand better value

University in stasis: It's our money and future on the line

It was bound to happen sooner or later -- I made a mistake.

Assuming the person I talked to at the director's office was the director, I erroneously thought [name withheld] headed the Facilities, Grounds, and Safety Department. I also made some offensive remarks concerning [their] competence in my last column.

Truth be told, she is not the director. [Name withheld] is a clerk. I was wrong, and I apologize.

It's important to get things right in the newspaper business. It's also important to get things right if you're in education or a state-funded enterprise -- like the University of Hawai`i.

Today's businesses exist in a world where they must be able to adapt to change in the market, adopting new strategies to compensate for the increased expectations of customers, and finding innovative ways of pushing the frontiers of their industry.

If a business is unable to provide the service the market expects, it will, sooner or later, find itself exiting its industry in less-than-glorious fashion.

Somehow, the principles behind meeting customers' needs don't seem to apply to UH. For whatever reason, UH seems to ignore the role competition plays in the education market, refusing to conform in an age of pervasive information technologies.

For example, when reapplying for financial aid, it is necessary to have a Satisfactory Academic Progress form filled out by a counselor of the student's college.

But why bother having a counselor fill the thing out and send it through campus mail? We have computers that can access all of that information in less than two minutes.

While UH is advertising to promote local student interest, it began doing so after Hawaii Pacific University started taking away UH's market share. We're playing the role of reactor in market development, not innovator.

This is especially true in light of increasing tuition expenses. If a consumer were to see the cost of an item rising year after year with no corresponding increase in value, a substitute product becomes more and more appealing.

This is soon in the statistics concerning Heald Business College's applications and admissions, which have mushroomed since 1995. This trend shows no signs of letting up. What is UH doing to expand its service to the community and its students?

According to Rosanne Harrigan, Dean of the School of Nursing, the supply of nurses goes in cycles.

Keeping local nurses in Hawai`i has proven problematic, since only about 60 percent of nurses are married, with an average of 1.6 dependents.

Because of Hawaii's cost of living, local nurses are driven to the Mainland, where they can fulfill dreams of owning a home. To compensate for the shortfall, temporaries are flown in and trained, only to be sent back after working a four-month term.

If the School of Nursing's budget gets cut by another ten percent, as is anticipated, the number of faculty members must face a corresponding drop.

This would lead to an even greater shortage of nurses, not only because of the local nurse exodus, but because there would be a lower supply of graduates with the same demand.

The net result is that the whole community suffers from the budget cuts of an organization whose mission statement claims a commitment to benefiting the community.

While Heald Business College has been increasing supply to accommodate increased for its services, UH's ability to provide better service though inventive use of resources almost forces people to consider educational alternatives.

In my opinion, we could start with the defunct vestiges of art haphazardly scattered around campus. The fountain outside the Student Services Center looks more like a Mayan ruin than an object d'art, while the Korean Studies Building decays, still without a completion date for repairs.

Kuykendall Hall's water fountain, when it was installed in 1964, actually had running water. Unfortunately, water is too expensive here in Hawai`i so it had to be turned off. Nowadays it serves as a garbage dump for the students who are too lazy to look for a rubbish bin.

UHM faces many challenges in the upcoming years. Autonomy questions bring uncertainty, budget cuts threaten departments' accreditation, and tuition increases push limits of our citizens' ability to work themselves out of the slavery that is the tourism industry.

If we could only shape up our campus, use technology to streamline operations, and maintain the integrity of our educational facilities, we could make the University of Hawai`i one of the best in the world.

That is, of course, if we could get things right.