Tending to Poly-capital Practices in Education Management

Accounting practices across higher education privilege money as the only legitimate form of capital. Colleges and universities place a price tag on programs, activities, and services, focusing on the all-important revenue-expenditure ratio. We should be diligent, however, to the possibility that our business model may measure the wrong things, leading to situations where operating budgets and financial assets increase, while the quality of campus culture, retention, and morale decreases. Financial considerations, while essential, do not by themselves lead to academic quality and human growth. 

We cannot sufficiently understand institutions of higher education numerically and by the flow of money. Financial principles are themselves never free from feelings and desires. Money carries a powerful archetypal load, existing as image, story, symbol, culture, and philosophy. It has links to non-rational values, the unconscious mind, and soul itself. We must necessarily operate our colleges and universities guided as much by social and cultural indicators. Honest judgments based on money alone can be, at best, partially true.

To stimulate achievement of profit and purpose, we can adopt what Per Espen Stoknes in Money and Soul calls “poly-capital” practices that extend beyond a narrow sense of what is profitable when we measure impact of capital as a single monetary factor. Absent from our budgeting, planning, and resource allocation are many essential forms of “capital,” including organizational, informational, technological, ecological, imaginal, psychological, and epistemological.

Business models that deal exclusively with increasing financial capital limit an organization’s sense of what can best be done, how, and for whom. They render a body-blow to innovation by not tending to the imagination. The building and use of poly-capital indicators of institutional strength is equally essential for financial sustainability, mission, vision, and values. 

Impact-values, such as collegiality, care, service, nimbleness, and compassion are ignored by strictly quantitative business models - and at great cost. A purely financially oriented quantitative metric offers no distinction between financial transactions that add holistically to a university’s strength and those that diminish it. Such a model glamorizes fragmentation of essential university structures and values, portraying the breakdown as economic gain. 

Widening our understanding of capital and scope of accounting, we may include qualitative and quantitative impact-values. We simply can’t afford to address purely material matters facing our institutions without considering corresponding improvements to our social networks and cultural commons. Because the latter have no explicit price tags and therefore no quantifiable value, they are in danger of being ignored in our decision-making. 

We must be able to identify, deliver, and measure tangible and intangible assets intrinsic to poly-capital value and their respective mediums of exchange to survive and thrive in today’s competitive higher education marketplace.