A Sense of Scale
The ups and downs of scaling in education with Gardner Campbell
We've all heard discussions of "scaling up" college and university courses and programs. But these are usually examinations of how to get the most bang for the buck through the widespread replication of high-profile courses.
Here, Gardner Campbell, an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University explores the notion of scale in education — scaling up and/or scaling down — and shares some of his own experience "playing with scale" in an English course at VCU.
Mary Grush: What is scale in the context of education? What are some of the keys to understanding it?
Gardner Campbell: Typically, scaling and sustainability are the two sister "S" words that get tossed around when curriculum and other education programs are discussed.
If a program is considered sustainable, that means you have the resources to run it; you have enough faculty to staff the classes for the foreseeable enrollment demand; if it's a course required for the major you can offer it often enough for a cohort to be able to take it; and so forth. Certainly, sustainability is important — but so are pilot programs and experiments!
Scaling, by contrast, is a question not only of resources but also of mission and priorities. So I've always been struck by the way discussions about scaling habitually veer toward how to replicate whatever the experience or program or course is for as many students as possible and at as low a cost to the institution as possible — usually calculated in terms of faculty labor. In other words, the question of scaling comes up in the context of mass production, which inevitably involves standardization and something like an assembly line.
The question of scaling comes up in the context of mass production, which inevitably involves standardization and something like an assembly line.
That has always seemed to me to be a one-way understanding of scaling that has some really severe unintended consequences. One is that you begin to look at every idea about learning, every design of every education program solely in terms of minimizing labor cost and maximizing profit by large-scale replication involving fewer faculty while keeping the tuition pricing more or less at the same level. Why? Because otherwise, universities are not making the money on these programs they want to make.
After I got into senior leadership — this was in the mid-2000s, running through roughly the mid-teens — I noticed I was hearing a lot of talk about how universities are businesses. Certainly, it's true. To be sustainable, universities need to be able to meet their budgets, have the money they need to keep the lights on and the physical plant in good repair, pay personnel… all the practical concerns of business.
However, stating that "universities are businesses," coupled with the term "scaling" in its current, standard usage, seems to leave us with a very flatly defined assertion.
Yes, universities cannot run at a deficit. They must make money to remain open. But a moment's reflection will bring to mind many different kinds of businesses — public libraries, mortuaries, veterinarians, churches. These institutions all have financial needs, but they're all very different in mission and social/cultural function. A nonprofit corporation is going to have a very different approach to budget, fundraising, and serving its mission than a Wall Street brokerage firm. And yet, the terms we use seem to get narrowed; rendered unidimensional.
As a result, scaling, as a topic of conversation, is almost always about scaling up. And the scaling up we talk about has, just as I've said, to do with presenting the educational experience to as many students as possible at as low a cost to the institution as possible — while, notably, usually not passing on any of those savings to the student, because otherwise the university is not going to make the money it wants to make.