Why do institutions of higher education have complicated and confusing organizational structures?

Last week I visited a business school in the UK. Out of courtsey, one of the senior faculty at the school showed me around - and we started discussing the way the school was organized. The faculty proudly informed me that the school was part of a bigger university and was responsbile for teaching management & law. The head of the school reported to someone at the university. The management part of the school was lead by a dean and it further split into four 'departments' - each one responsible for conducting resaerch into its own area and thus, buidling horizontal centres of excellence. Once such department was 'Strategy'.

The various programs run by the school of management are treated as a vertical stream, cutting through all the four horizontal 'centres of excellence'. Each program is owned by one of the four departments - the MBA program was owned by the department of strategy. The academic program director , responsible for development & delivery of MBA curriculum, was a faculty researcher within the department of strategy and reported to the HoD (head of department). One of his key areas of responsibility was to pull in lectures and researchers from the other three 'centres of excellence' within the school of management to deliver MBA curriculum. Any subject which was not researched within one of these four departments had to be resourced from the other part of the school (ie the school of law) or indeed from other schools in the university (eg psychology).

By this time, I was reasonably dizzy trying to visualize the predicament of poor MBA students who were ambitious enough to be wanting to study MBA electives for which the faculty needed to be resourced from different parts of the organization. I was further informed that the budget for academic programs needed to be apportioned to these various 'contributors' from various parts of the organizations - each one with their own priorities. Thus, some researchers, who did not form a direct part of the 'department of strategy' within the 'management part' of the 'school of management & law' were more interested in researching and /or teaching masters students, rather than teaching MBAs. However, the MBA program could not afford a dedicated tutor in this area as the class size of students is small (about 50) compared to the overall school size (close to 1000).

I had assumed that since the primary job of an academic institution is to teach its students, the MBA program would not have problems sourcing faculty from different parts of the organizations. Obviously, despite having spent some considerable time in the field of post graduate management education, I was naive enough to harbour such assumptions. Something else suddenly struck me - if this is the confusion around core curriculum, how about other activities that are so important to an MBA ie career services and alumni services. Here again, I was educated on the fact that since MBAs form only a miniscule part of the 'school of management & law' (and indeed for the whole university), no one within the school of management was sure about whose areas of responsbilities were these - a central office served to fulfil the needs of everyone in the school of management & law and the MBAs would be served through that office.

This raises the following questions in my mind:

a) Why are the educational institutions structured in such complexity?
b) What happens to 'customer centricity' in such complex organizations - while many institutions may debate on whether students should be considered & treated as 'customers', most would agree that they are certainly one of the most important stakeholders. If that is the case, why is the structure not defined keeping in mind the student needs?
c) Who takes the decision in such complexity - in my experience, no one does! And this is one of the reasons why the decision making process at B schools takes forever.

Job search for MBA students - impact of economic crisis

During my visits to various business schools in the UK/Western Europe and talks with/to MBA students, I am constantly amazed by the naivity they display towards securing a job after completion of their MBA program. While the MBA is supposed to make these students a manager/leader of business, they do not seem to take the same rigorous approach in managing their job search and careers. This seems to be especially true of international students viz students who enrol on an MBA program in the UK/Europe, but who have no past experience (work or otherwise) in these countries.

While these students will engage in applying rigorous tools and methodologies in solving a complex business problem, they adopt a very simplistic approach when looking for a job. This simplistic approach can be summed up as 'I have paid huge money to get into this MBA program and the school will automatically find me a job that I want'.

Even during the best of boom years, the above approach worked only for the very top elite schools who had established corporate contacts that would conduct campus placements. Over the past few years, even these elite schools encourage their students to do their own job search as campus visits by recruiters have started declining for a variety of reasons. For the rest of the B schools, campus placement was not a serious option even during the best of times. These schools have small MBA class size and large non-MBA programs, thereby, making the investments in MBA careers services an impossible option. In the current scenario, campus placement for such B schools is unthinkable, especially if the school has no careers services department for MBAs. Despite these home truths, the MBA students at these schools act as if a job offer is to be expected in the same post as the MBA program admissions offer.

My message to such students is simple but blunt - no B school has ever guaranteed a job to its students. Own job search by students (where students look for jobs on their own with some advice/support from school career services and alumni) has always been a primary way of finding jobs after MBA and if anything, this will only increase in the future. The students, especially from smaller B schools, therefore, need to develop separate skills, and more importantly, positive attitude, for managing own job searches while still studying on the program. My work with B schools in the UK focusses on training current students (and especially international students) in this area but the students will only be doing themselves a favour by acknowledging this bitter truth. A change in attitude is urgently required if the proportion of MBA students landing a job within 3 months of completion of the program is to go up.