The concept of third-party vendors leasing campus
services is all too familiar to college store professionals. The University of
Maryland University College (UMUC) is taking that a step further, spinning off it’s
own units into start-up companies offering their own services to others, all in an
effort to grow endowments and keep tuition rates down.
“We believe that if you look at higher education, there
is a core—what you teach, who teaches it, and how we teach it,” UMUC President
Javier Miyares said in an interview for Inside Higher Education. “That is the existential, essential core of the
university. Everything else are business processes that do not have to be run
in the traditional way within the university.”
In 2015, the UMUC office of analytics was converted
into a data-analytics service and there are plans to spin off the IT department
into a company to be known as AccelerEd. UMUC Ventures was formed as a holding
company to help the university realize some financial benefit when these new
firms sell their services.
“UMUC recognizes that higher-education institutions
have an obligation to students to reimagine how they achieve their missions,” said
Ryan Craig, managing director of the investment firm University Ventures. “Too
much of college and university spending is currently allocated to functions
that do not directly serve the interests of tuition-paying students.”
However, there are critics of UMUC’s unbundling
tactics.
“As a taxpayer of Maryland, I think of UMUC as a state
treasure,” said former UMUC employee George Kroner. “The university has a
special academic mission, and I hate seeing it put on the back burner. I don’t
want to see the great work of UMUC privatized.”
