PLANNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION: THE GAP BETWEEN ADVOCACY AND ACTUALITY

Since 1970 a major theme in the literature on higher education administration has been the need for better planning in institutions of higher education. Planning in colleges and universities traditionally has been ad-hoc, informal, fragmented, and short-term, according to most planning advocates. What is needed to cope with contemporary conditions, they maintain, is a more rational approach to planning that can be characterized by six descriptors: systematic, long-term, substantive, comprehensive, integrated, and data-based. Models incorporating these characteristics abound. Most of the literature on planning in higher education is normative. The empirical studies that are available, coupled with the observations of many higher education scholars and administrators, suggest that rational-comprehensive planning models have neither been widely adopted nor notably successful in institutions where they have been tried. The purpose of this study was to explore the apparent gap between advocacy and actuality in planning in higher education by comparing prescriptions and practice. An extensive review of the literature details the former, while the latter is rendered in a case study of a comprehensive planning process initiated in a large public university in the fall of 1980. Interviews with key participants, surveys of many other participants, study of numerous documents including plans prepared by all major units of the institution, and observation of meetings of the institutional planning committee provided the data for both a detailed chronological description of this planning process and an analysis of this actuality as compared with the planning tasks and process elements advocated in the literature. It was found that, by and large, the actual planning project failed to fulfill either the criteria of the advocates or the intentions of its originators. Assuming that the case studied was not totally atypical, the study concludes with some hypotheses concerning the relationship between rational-comprehensive planning models and the contexts in which they are implemented. It is suggested that the approach to planning most often advocated for institutions of higher education is essentialy incongruous with the organization characteristics and governance modes of large universities. Further research should begin with these actualities