129Reducing Higher Education Bureaucracy and Reclaiming the Entrepreneurial. . .

First, researchers could explore the effect of economic recessions on higher education outcomes. An economic recession typically leads organizations to pursue greater efﬁciency, often taking the form of cost-cutting and de-bureaucratization. For example, the 2008–2009 recession led to reduced bureaucracies in traditional organizations such as corporations (Hamel & Zanini, 2020), as well as to costcutting and redundancies in higher education (Friga, 2020). The most recent global economic slowdown resulted from lockdown policies regarding Covid-19 (Robinson et al., 2021). However, at least in the United States, the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES) Act and subsequent supplements provided $2.59 trillion in government relief (DataLab, 2021), including over $14 billion for higher education. The loss of only 650,000 higher education positions during the Covid-19 pandemic (Bauman, 2021) suggests that the extensive CARES funding limited the actual effect of the severe economic recession, and inevitably stalled many higher education institutions from further layoffs and permanent closures. Future research can explore universities’ ﬁnancial management during the COVID-19 era. A second key trend is the entry of third parties into the university market. In the online graduate business education market, there are roughly three models that explore the classic make, buy, or ally decisions that traditional companies face when seeking growth in new markets. For business schools, the make choice involves the organic development of internally building activities which range from recruitment through the development of curriculum and pedagogy. Two examples of in-house development of highly ranked graduate and executive programs in business are Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business and Florida Atlantic University’s College of Business. The buy option is rarely used, but one example is the Shanghai-based China Europe International Business School’s (CEIBS) purchase of the Lorange Institute of Business in Zurich to build a European footprint (Murray, 2019). The most common path is an alliance, whereby an external party conducts the majority of the marketing and other administrative activities and takes a share of the revenues, which typically range from 33–66% of gross tuition, as at American University’s Kogod School of Business (with a 66% revenue share with 2 U) and at the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business (with a roughly 50% revenue share with Pearson, although select services can be bundled or unbundled). A promising line of future research explores the longterm sustainability of these third-party–run programs, and their effect on the universities’ other offerings, as well as the overall market for graduate education.

Another important phenomenon is third-party actors which can contract with higher education institutions, but also develop their own non-university solutions. Corporations have noticed rapidly expanding academic costs and bureaucracy, and many have responded with their own education solutions. For example, Google publicly eschews university credentials when hiring new staff, and recently created its own education certiﬁcations (Dishman, 2020). This line of research could examine the effectiveness of third-party entries and universities’ responses.

130S. Terjesen

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