Doing good while performing well at Flemish universities: benchmarking higher education institutions in terms of social inclusion and market performance

ABSTRACT

Universities, and higher education institutions in general, are ever more influenced by output-driven performance indicators and models that originally stem from the profit-organisational context. As a result, universities are increasingly considering management tools that support them in the (decision) process for attaining their strategic goals. The growth-share matrix is one of these tools that has proven its value in diverse business and competitive contexts in the past few decades. The present study’s contribution is twofold. First, we apply and interpret the growth-share matrix as part of a strategic positioning analysis in a strategic university context. Second, we extend this tool by incorporating social inclusion as a third dimension in the analysis. In recent years, discussions on the rising social disparity among adolescents in higher education have increased and different types of actors have raised the motivation to create more equal opportunities for prospective students who rank among the group of socially disadvantaged adolescents. The findings of an empirical case of the proposed model for a particular Belgian academic programme show that increased social inclusion and higher performance parameters, such as growth in student enrolments and diplomas, can be reached simultaneously.

KEYWORDS:

• Strategic positioning analysis
• growth-share matrix
• inclusive education
• special needs education
• social inclusion index
• operationalisation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank A. Derks and P. De Vos from the Flemish Ministery of Education and Training for their support in providing anonymized data for our empirical study.

Notes on contributors

Prof. Dr Elvira Haezendonck (Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Solvay Business School) is Full Professor at the University of Brussels (VUB), Visiting Professor at the University of Antwerp (UA), and guest lecturer at Erasmus University of Rotterdam (Maritime Economics and Logistics) and at C-MAT (University of Antwerp, UA). Her research covers topics in the field of management, strategy and policy: socio-economic impact analysis and complex project evaluation, CSR and environmental strategy, competitive analysis and stakeholder management. She has published various articles, books and book chapters in these domains, and since 1996, she has been involved in over 50 national and EU research projects on, for example, long-term strategy analyses and impact assessments in ports and infrastructure. Since 2010 she (co-)promotes a Research Chair on Public-Private Partnerships at VUB, currently sponsored by Deloitte, Grontmij, KBC, Laga and Triodos. She teaches courses on Management, (Competitive) Strategy and Project Management, mostly on master level.

Kim Willems is Assistant Professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and affiliated to Hasselt University (Belgium) since October 2012. She is Visiting Professor at IESEG Business School in Lille (France). Her research focuses on retail marketing and consumer behavior. She published among others in Journal of Business Research and Psychology & Marketing and teaches courses such as Marketing, Strategic Marketing and Advanced Marketing.

Jenny Hillemann is a postdoctoral fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, from which she received a Ph.D. in Business Economics in December 2014. She is John H. Dunning visiting fellow 2015/2016 at the Henley Business School, University of Reading, UK, and guest lecturer at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Her research includes the managerial analysis of multinational enterprise strategy and the broader governance challenges facing international firms. To date, her research contributions have been published as three edited book chapters in well-known book series, and articles in the journals Accountancy & Bedrijfskunde, Multinational Business Review and International Business Review. She has been awarded the 2014 Academy of International Business/Sheth Dissertation Proposal Award and was nominated for the 2015 Academy of Management D'Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University Award for the Best Dissertation in International Management and for the 2015 International Theme Committee & Emerald Best International Dissertation Award at the Academy of Management.

Notes

1 The term ‘SEN students’ stands for Special Educational Needs students. In Section 4.2, we elaborate on how this group of SEN students is particularly conceived of and operationalised in the present paper’s empirical study.

2 The Flemish universities are University of Ghent, University of Antwerp, Hasselt University, Vrije Universiteit Brussel and University of Leuven (campus Leuven and campus Brussels).

3 This system of expressing course weights in terms of credits (ECTS) found entrance in higher education mainly following up on the Bologna agreements in search for a unified European higher education system, wherein students can study abroad freely within the EU and obtain recognition for their efforts, thanks to a EU-wide recognised system of ECTS (e.g. to obtain a course exemption at the home university after having taken an equivalent course abroad in, for example, an Erasmus exchange). A full year of study is expressed in an equivalent of 60 credits. A typical first cycle Bachelor’s degree consists of 180–240 credits, while a typical second cycle Master’s Degree comprises 90–120 credits. The ECTS has been adopted by most of the countries in the European Higher Education Area, and is getting further dispersed outside the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) as well (cf. European Commission, Education and Training online 2016).