regarding the potential for financial gain as the result of technological innova- tion. Guskin (1994) argues that administrative costs must be reduced through the implementation and use of new technologies with resultant reduction in labor before it will be possible to restructure the faculty so that its energies are directed toward appropriate learning outcomes. El-Khawas (1994) reported that nearly 70 percent of colleges and universities had undertaken some form of administrative reorganization, but substantially fewer were actually reducing staff. Colleges are instead making efforts to increase productivity and develop additional revenue streams (Rhoades, 1995). As Rhoades noted, “Currently, the push is toward brief, efficient encounters that do not engage students or promote relationship” (p. 34). Cohen (1998) observed that this is not a new phenomenon:
The quest for efficiency in instruction has a long history … These patterns are tried continually. Failure to find the magic bullet that would yield a notable increase in efficiency is attributed variously to professors who stubbornly refuse to work longer hours, uncaring administrators and bean-counters who look only to the bottom line of passing more students through so that tuition and state reimbursements remain high enough to balance the budget, and apathetic students who refuse to apply themselves to their studies. (pp. 366-367)
He continues, “Educators have long sought technology that would enrich the learning environment and reduce students’ dependence on the live instructor”
(p. 367). Cohen then sited Cuban’s (1986) work exploring the efforts that have taken place since the 1920s to incorporate technology in teaching. Cuban concluded that each successive wave of technological pressure came sup- ported by self-motivated claims from interested stakeholders regarding the power of the innovation to impact positively on learning. Initial implementation was followed by academic studies showing more modest gains and by frustrations with the slow place of complete transformation. The administrative response to those frustrations has been to blame faculty who are characterized as resistant to change. Cuban (1986) referred to this recurring pattern as “the exhiliration/scientific-credibility/disappointment/teacher-bashing cycle” (p. 5).
Cohen (1998) stated that the shift toward technology, which has been pat- terned on a similar earlier shift in business, is unlikely to offer cost savings or to enhance attainment of learning outcomes. Cohen noted that the unrealized
expectations of technology within higher education are not unlike those experienced in the business world upon which they were modeled:
The quest for saving money through increasing productivity, with technology as the centerpiece, has merged with the desire to make people more responsible for their own education and with the changes in hierarchical systems in the workplace. But technology does not operate itself; instructional programs are not self-generating … By no measure has information technology resulted in greater instructional productivity.
For that matter few industries have enjoyed increased per capita output sufficient to justify the billions spent on it. Nonetheless, higher education has been compelled to install it because it is an essential component of student literacy. The graduates will enter a world where all forms of information technology are basic tools … The colleges have to install technology and their staff has to use it, even if it adds to the cost of instruction. (pp. 371-372)
Why has the infusion of computing and computing-networks not helped to reduce administrative costs substantially in higher education? Hilmer and Donaldson (1996) answer that it is because machines and computers can perform mathematical functions and routinized sorting tasks but are incapable of carrying out the more qualitative analytical and interpersonal communication functions of middle- and senior-level management. An area of service where this can be observed is in student affairs administration.
Student affairs is a profession that focuses on a student’s personal and psychosocial development by providing those opportunities for them to gain cultural capital through the development of their interpersonal, communicative, leadership and social skills (Wolf-Wendel & Ruel, 1999). Student affairs work requires face-to-face contact with students. While technology can augment this process, to force the technology upon this institutional unit is to force a philosophical change in the mission of the student affairs profession (Moneta, 1997).
Student affairs are not rooted in a one-size-fits-all philosophy (West & Dagigle, 1997). Rather, student services and student affairs are tailored to the individual.
West and Dagigle (1997) present a number of reasons to incorporate a technological infrastructure in student services: speed and accuracy, conve- nience, efficiency, interactivity, and professionalization. The challenge is how to
customize the use of technology so as to accommodate the individual student.
This would require student service professionals to move from the role of information provider toward that of information facilitator. In other words, it would require them to provide students with the know-how to search for information and be more self-sufficient through the use of technology, a model that is being explored in the student-faculty relationship as well. Furthermore, to be fully effective in the new technological paradigm student affairs profes- sionals must assume the roles of systems architects, educators, learners, and policy makers while forming collaborative links to academic affairs and information technology industries (Ausiello & Wells, 1997). However, it may be that the goals of student affairs are not being incorporated into the information systems as student services professionals are not being fully included in the design process (Barratt, 2001).
Students have become “more informed consumers, demanding a level of university service comparable to that which they receive from other entities in society” (Karns, 1993, p. 27). Students are paying more for their education and there is a greater influx of adult students who are demanding greater service and accountability for the expenses to higher education. Hoover (1997) stated that the student affairs profession faces increasing pressure from administration to provide empirical evidence of the value of face-to-face services and programs versus the value of those same services and programs provided at a distance.
Although technologically-delivered student services also entail high costs, it is interesting that it is the efficiency of personal interactions that must be justified rather than the technological expenditures. In an academic climate prone to technocratic decision making, technology often trumps the personal (and the personnel).