Published May 30, 2007
My father, who writes about issues in education in his blog, recently suggested that universities are in the knowledge supply chain management business. That made me ask myself: if there is a knowledge supply chain, then there must somewhere be an inventory of knowledge, right? My father argues that inventory is held in the universities, which create and collect knowledge, but I’d say that knowledge inventory is much more held in the hands of university graduates, who store knowledge in case their employers ever need it. This just-in-time inventory system allows businesses to avoid investing in knowledge creation and management, but means that individuals — the player with the least ability to pay — are stuck holding the inventory and paying the purchase and holding cost thereof. As college educations become more expensive, we must shift knowledge inventory-holding from individuals and to universities; if universities help us do this, they can make more money doling out that knowledge to in a just-in-time manner than they do pushing that inventory into the personal inventory of hundreds of thousands of grads every year.