Doors to Academia

The Planner’s Conceit

by | May 9, 2026 | Essays and Commentaries

Many have experienced a cell phone upgrade or a promise that a new IT system could work seamlessly with your existing operational procedures; only to discover to your chagrin that the changes crashed your phone or administrative systems. Phone and system upgrades are mentioned first because most people are too well aware of how these supposed upgrades have disrupted their lives. These failures waste your time, energy, and money without improving anything. I call these failures the planner’s conceit because the designer sincerely believe that their upgrades will work smoothly, but for some reason, their quality assessment is either non-existent or woefully designed. The results are – costly downtime and loss of students or clients. The purpose of this blog is to suggest actions that can be taken to reduce the likelihood of major errors that disrupt operations, frustrate users, and annoy clients.

Software Conceits

Here are just a few examples of the ‘planners’ conceit’ in higher education; you can probably easily come up with your own list.

  • An upgrade to the calendar on your phone that erases all your appointments;
  • Phone upgrades that wipe out picture files;
  • An upgrade to excel that treats every log-off as a crash;
  • An upgrade to word that buries the ribbon display forcing you to reload it not just for the session, but every few minutes;
  • Inconsistent spelling and editing errors identified in word.doc programs;
  • Upgrades to word that never resolve old problems that can be traced to the original problem;
  • New student registration-finance systems that are not tested before first use resulting in multiple registration errors with a large percentage of students place in the wrong classes or not making arrangements to pay their bills.
  • Software company promises that a new business system will smoothly work with your existing registration structure and fails on first use.
  • Financial system designers who promise that their system will easily accommodate your billing system until you run the billing cycle and spend a week matching bills to actual registrations;
  • Inadequate security that results in costly breaches of data records or even worse lockouts in which software is permanently unusable or subject to a large ransom payment.

Management Planners Conceit

‘Planners Conceit ‘can be found any place where new systems are put into operation and fail ignominiously because the planner assumed that they made sense, and the user will discover the benefit of the change when they learn how it works. The conceit is on several levels – that the change will work efficiently when in operation, that users are dolts, and the user made internal changes that fouled the changes. Here are several anecdotal samples.

  • Hospital or airport signage that misdirects you.
  • Hospitals issue new parking privileges, which inadvertently removes access for patients at a nearby parking lot. The result was a half block walk was replaced with a mile walk uphill.
  • A school bus manager redesigns bus routes used IT but did not test the new route design. Result of the change was that for the first week of school a large number of students were left standing at their pick-up point for buses that never came.
  • A web designer builds a new website but never proofed it before it went live. Result was that there were numerous grammatical and information errors.
  • A traffic engineer installs new traffic lights with expensive traffic sensing systems and does not assess whether traffic movement improves. The result were longer lines for all lanes.

Why Upgrades and New Systems Fail

Too often upgrades and new systems fail because: the upgrade/new system fixes a product that is not broken because the changes do not involve the end user.

The Swiss Cheese Model shows how failures must penetrate multiple layers of defense.

Design failures are often described as the line-up of the holes (defects) in slices of Swiss cheese; i.e., the planner assumes that that there is a small probability of unknown weaknesses lining-up at the same time.[1] According to Michael Parent in an article on planning design failures, the likelihood of failure increase with the number of processes, internal complexity, and coupling of processes.[2] The hard part in today’s world of software and operational systems is that they have numerous process and incorporate complex levels of design that despite the best of intentions can at some point result with the Swiss Cheese defects lining-up in unintended ways.

Suggestions on How to Reduce the Probability of Designer Errors

  • Caveat Emptor – test promises and premises before the product is installed or paid-in-full.
  • Keep a log of past problems because they can provide a key to solving new problems.
  • Review the design with the front-line employees who have to put it into operation.
  • User and operator training does not necessarily solve latent defects that are beyond the scope of training.
  • Hire the best qualified IT staff, who know how to diagnose and write solutions to a new administrative system or to an upgrade. Too often problems arise when IT staff does not have the capability to sort out and fix problems.
  • Examples of standard processes for reducing upgrade or new system errors per Michael Parent[3]:
    • Before any tests are conducted load a detailed chart of accounts, course identifiers, room locators, and any other data that will be used to produce an accurate interface between the registrar, bursar, academic departments, and the business office.
    • Test complex user scenarios for the registration, business office, academic, and other coupled departments that define a process.
    • Test errors both typical and known one-of-a-kind errors.
    • Design procedures to use when there are a large number of errors or a system crash.
    • Test all assumptions used to design new software, new procedures, or updates.
    • Carefully review the operations manual with the team on the firing line and identify and correct or test any problems.
    • Test procedures and software when new technology is introduced.

  1. Michael Parent (July 10, 2025) (Retrieved March 25, 2026); “Bad design is like a virus: design defects and latent failures;”; UX Collective;

    Bad design is like a virus: design defects and latent failures | by Michael Parent | UX Collective. ↑

  2. Ibid; Parent (July 10, 2025). ↑

  3. Ibid; Parent (July 10, 2025).

Do Ever Larger Tuition Discounts Work at All Colleges?

by | May 9, 2026 | Private Colleges & Universities in Crisis

In an April 2025 blog, I raised the question of whether or not tuition discounting (institutional grants) has run its course for college with enrollment less than 2,000 full-time-equivalent students. The blog used data up to 2023. Now, I have added IPEDS data from data to the analysis, The analysis looks at the effect that a 1% change in tuition discounting has on enrollment.

Chart 1 shows that for colleges with less than 2,000 students that any kind of a positive relationship between tuition discounting and enrollment has collapsed. Increasing the discount at these schools has had no impact on enrollment. It would almost appear that they have already encountered the demographic cliff five years before the predicted year. The polynomial trend suggests that calamity may be just around the corner.

For colleges with enrollments equal to or greater than 2,000 students, the polynomial trend suggests that the marginal value of tuition discounting may have started to flatten. It would not be too surprising that trend for these colleges will turn downward.

Chart 1

I have included Chart 2, which uses a linear trend analysis, because it is easier to interpret the slopes of a linear equation. Colleges with enrollments equal to or greater than 2,0000 students have a very small up ward trend, while the linear trend for colleges under 2,000 confirms what was noted for Chart 1. Small colleges are getting no effect from increases in tuition discounts.

Chart 2

For my conclusion, I will only talk about colleges with less than 2,000 FTE students. The average small college is wasting its time with tuition discounting. Here is an alternative pricing and by implication marketing strategy. If your college’s net tuition is less than the tuition charged by your competition, change your gross price so that it is under the competition. Then advertise that you offer students a quality degree with a reasonable price. If your net price is under the public university in your area, lower your price to slightly below the public university. Then advertise to their market that they can earn a degree at your college without the hassle of a major university that doesn’t care about you.

Wish you the best as you work to keep your college from tipping over the demographic cliff.

 

Must Read #2

by | Apr 25, 2026 | Private Colleges & Universities in Crisis

The Hechinger Report just published a study contending that “More Than 25% of Private Colleges Are at Risk of Closing.” This is a must read for every private college president and board member. Are you on the Hechinger List? Here is the citation: As one Vermont college finishes its last semester, a new projection shows that 442 more are at similar risk .

I, also, found the same potential for deep financial distress for private colleges in an analysis of 994 private colleges conducted three years ago.

The findings showed that 51 (5.4%) colleges faced a very high risk of closing within three years. These colleges had enrollments of less than 1,000 FTE students. Another 242 (25.5%) private colleges had a risk score placing them at great risk of closing within between three and six years. This risk band included colleges with enrollments between 1,000 and 2,000 FTE.

The analysis employed a Vulnerability Gauge based on a two variable logit regression that had an 86.3% prediction rate. The model used IPEDS data from the five-year period ending in 2024. My speculation is that as the slope of the demographic cliff increases many of the ‘great risk’ colleges will slide into the ‘high risk’ category.

The Hechinger Report and the Vulnerability Gauge need to be taken seriously by presidents and boards of trustees of private colleges. The window for taking strategic action will shrink quickly as each semester passes-by. When a college enters the Spring budget season, and if its risk continues to grow because enrollment and cash reserves are falling precipitously, the well-known strategy of ‘kicking the can down the road’ will no longer work. Under this strategy, the college could discover, all too soon, that the college has little or no financial reserves available to put an effective strategy into place.

Must Read #1
Wall Street Journal Story on St. Michael’s College

by | Apr 25, 2026 | Private Colleges & Universities in Crisis

The Wall Street Journal’s story about the struggles of St. Michael’s College is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the problems faced by colleges today and over the next decade. Ten years ago, no one would have believed that St. Michael’s would face long-term declines in enrollments and serial deficits. Now, it is, and its story is not an uncommon story for many colleges throughout the country.

Here is the citation: The Small Private Colleges Dying in a Winner-Take-All University Marketplace – WSJ

 

Normalizing Operational Deviance

by | Apr 25, 2026 | Private Colleges & Universities in Crisis

When Cutting Corners Becomes the Norm

Airlines, aircraft safety analysts, and organizational effectiveness managers use ‘normalizing operational deviance’ to describe when someone consistently violates policies and procedures until it becomes a standard method of operations. This concept often comes up when the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) reports on airplane accidents that were due to pilot negligence in not following standard procedures. For example, when a pilot in landing or take-off and makes too sharp a turn leading to a wing stall and the plane crashes. Another cases, is when an inexperienced private pilot fails to follow standard procedures during bad weather when landing at a busy commercial airport and crashes.

Non-aviation organizations are also susceptible to ‘normalizing operational deviance’, but there outcomes may not be as catastrophic as a plane wreck. Nevertheless, failing to follow procedures can result in strategic failures, overspending, violation of debt conditions, or significant accreditation problems.

Here are several examples of ‘normalizing deviance’ in colleges.

  • Academic programs that do not closely monitor transcripts, which results in students graduating without earning the required credits. Both financial auditors and accreditors may catch this problem, and they can require the colleges to tell graduates that they did not accumulate sufficient credits to graduate and will then have to return to earn the missing credits. This is a very messy business because graduates do not want to return to classes, and they do not want to pay for the college’s mistake.
  • President and chief academic officers that fail to develop rigorous operational plans to implement college strategies, which results in strategic expectations being dashed because critical steps were never taken. Over time, the chief leadership of the college assumes that all is well with their strategies until the plans fail leaving the college in deep financial and academic distress.
  • Business offices too often pay for the purchases made by college employees who did not follow standard approval procedures. These unauthorized purchases can grow to a point where they lead to large budget over-runs. An unfortunate aspect of unauthorized purchases is that they distort budget and strategic plans by diverting financial resources to serve the interest of a department or an employee and not the college. By normalizing this deviant behavior, colleges are often surprised to discover that these unauthorized purchases are hard to control and can quickly deplete cash reserves.
  • Equipment purchases are not tracked by the business office, which can lead to the loss of costly items. These losses often are not recognized until a fixed asset audit is conducted
  • In some cases, presidents and chief buildings officers do not hire an independent construction manager to monitor construction so that the college can save money. The result is that they depend on the contractor to honestly follow speciation’s and regulations. If mistakes occur, material and design specifications are not followed, or local government building and zonings regulations are ignored, projects are delayed or expensive changes are needed, which result in cost overruns of the project. Long-term problems can show-up when equipment, materials, and sub-structures begin to fail. Even if the building is insured, insurance companies may reduce or reject claims because they believe the problems were caused by the negligence on the part of the college.
  • IT can be problematic when the system is not set-up for consistent and regular backup, changes are not documented, the system is not updated, or system errors are allowed to linger and are not fixed.

In sum, normalizing operational deviance can lead to complacency, which could result in major system failures.