BUA441 Position Topic: Accountability in the public sector

How can we have true accountability and resourcefulness in the public sector, specifically higher education, when there is no real incentive to do so? For instance in the college district that I work for, all employees of a particular employee group (exempt, non-exempt, faculty, etc) all receive the same pay raise every year regardless of individual performance. The manager has absolutely no financial tools to use to encourage or reprimand employees.

So there exists a general sense of entitlement and apathy among most employees that the taxpayer will end up feeding. We have created top-heavy organizations where managers have been rendered impotent, and thus there is no incentive for them to perform as well.

To combat this, individuals resort to heroics to get things accomplished. The problem with heroics is that it is not sustainable over the long term. Top performers are asked to do more and more until they are burned out and join the ranks of the apathetic.

I do not know of a solution without bring market forces into the equation. Administrators and staffers could be paid on the basis of performance with enrollment and retention as the basic metrics. That would be a start and perhaps this would lead to accountability and resourcefulness with the taxpayer dollar.