The "More-ness" Trap: Making the Case for "Less-ness" in Higher Education

 

If one watches the workload of faculty members in Higher Education Institutions these days, one cannot help wondering if excess has become the new normal. By workload, I do not exclusively refer to the teaching load per se—the number of hours they engage in sessions or meet with students. By workload, I mean the total burden placed onto the shoulders of the faculty in one form or another, appearing in multiple avatars as coordinators, in-charges, organizing secretaries, reporters, or even presidents! This happens because institutions are doing more, or at least trying to. Somehow, in their misguided wisdom, HEIs have come to believe that doing more will lead to earning more respect, acceptability, reputation, relevance, and ultimately, more wins and enrollments. This escalation spiral is one urgent area that demands a rethink at the decision-making level in HEIs.

This hyper-activity materializes in many forms: more committees, more events, more seminars, more trips, more invited talks, more meetings, more documents, more reports, and obviously more posters to announce them all! It means more content creation, more committees to form, more minutes to write, more emails to check, more dashboards to manage, more blogs to write, more articles to publish, more skills to impart, more placements to announce, more liaison with authorities, and more industry interactions. This escalation raises an important question: does doing more necessarily lead to better outcomes? If one college starts a cycling club, another immediately follows. If one college launches a Thinking Hub, the next one mirrors it. A "hug a tree" campaign here, another similar initiative there; a water quality assurance cell here, and an identical one everywhere! Each of these exercises involves decision-making, meetings, documentation, publicity, content creation, and networking. But the crucial question remains: does it give a proportionate edge to the institution in public positioning or reputation?

Since a good number of colleges continue to struggle to fill their seats, it is apparent that most of these activities are not yielding the expected outcomes. The counter-argument, of course, is that many of these initiatives are meant to provide skills and exposure to students. While that is certainly a possibility, ensuring such returns requires rigorous assessment. In reality, career capabilities based on these skill sets fail to reliably correlate with the sheer volume of activities. Hence, if everyone has to keep running—as the Red Queen suggests to Alice in Through the Looking-Glass—just to remain in the same place, we must question the futility of the exercise. This image serves as a telling metaphor for our times. If every institution is doing more yet remaining static, it is a classic case of Red Queen dynamics. As is increasingly evident, more committees, events, and documentation are not helping institutions gain higher ranks or better accreditations.

The wiser path is to pause, reflect, and arrive at the sensible conclusion that rather than continually expanding the list of activities and clubs—rather than burdening faculty with unproductive excess—HEIs must focus on cutting the fat and discovering how less can produce more. If a placement cell cannot drive results, the solution is not automatically to create a Placement Support Cell, adding administrative layers while gaining diminishing returns. The solution lies in diagnosing how to make the existing cell truly productive. A studied analysis will help the institution shed its current skin and grow one capable of delivering results. If what a cell has been doing fails to contribute to its core purpose—ensuring placement capabilities and connecting with potential employers—then the need of the hour is to stop doing what isn't working and scrap obsolete schedules and training programs. What doesn't make sense or serve its original intent must go. If everyone else is busy adding, perhaps the real competitive edge lies in knowing what to stop adding.

Moving from endless expansion toward strategic streamlining brings a host of advantages to HEIs. To begin with, it helps us answer a fundamental question: are HEIs producing more educational work, or actual education? Such a question naturally arises from the stark disconnect between the quantum of work and the absence of equivalent, meaningful outcomes. A leaner college structure allows an institution to focus on fewer priorities to achieve far better results. It directly addresses the administrative bloat caused by an excess of committees, meetings, and paperwork. Furthermore, it helps de-escalate the institutional "arms race" driven by FOMO—the fear of missing out. A flurry of extra clubs, talks, and promotional posters merely accumulates operational overhead with diminishing impact on the target audience: the students. For many HEIs, the paradox remains that an accelerated event schedule does not translate to higher enrollments or stronger capabilities. This productivity paradox can be effectively addressed through intentional reduction. Rather than asking what more we can do, we need to ask: what should we stop doing so the institution can do the essentials better?

_ Babu. P. K