Illuminating the mysterious and changing third mission of higher education
Abstract
The mysterious and changing third mission of higher education is the subject of this study. It begins by tracing this mission from its beginnings as extension, outreach, and service to the present-day emphases on partnerships and economic development. A nomenclature was gathered from the literature and refined into a four-category framework for organizing third mission activities. Strategic plans of 19 universities in the Kellogg Commission Profile study or the Southern Growth Policies Board study were examined using the framework. The method was content analysis, a research technique to analyze the written word in quantitative groupings to pull meanings into focus that the prose format did not readily emit. Two contributions of this study are the literature review about change in higher education related to the third mission and the framework for better understanding it, “The Third Mission Category and Topic Coding Scheme.” Two categories centered on the older one-way endeavors of academic professionals assisting citizens in their business or civic endeavors. Two emphasized the newer two-way sharing interactions between higher education and business. One finding is that these universities demonstrated considerable variation in how the activities divided among the categories. The two newer categories for partnerships and economic development accounted for one third of the total activities. Another finding was that the largest single category of third mission activities is still the original community service component, the one which is hardest to remunerate. When added together, the other three categories—all related to professional or business endeavors and all more easily recognized for remuneration and recognition—constituted the majority of third mission activities. Limited evidence suggested that over time the service component is decreasing and the business-related categories are increasing in emphasis. Results are given for total references to third mission topics, references by category, and references for each university. The literature review and the data analysis substantiate that higher education, though stoic, does change and in directions conducive to society's influences. Further time, funding, and comparison studies will continue illuminating this mysterious mission.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Hirth, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Higher education|Education history|Educational software
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