Constituents

The (re)engineering of a (business) process is an exercise in systems engineering, and it is a classical principle of systems engineering that systems are engineered to meet the requirements of a customer, which in our case immediate raises the issue of two conflicting paradigms of higher education:

1. students as customers
2. students as work-in-progress.

Recently the notion of customer has been generalized to a group of customers, called constituents or stakeholders. Under this broader paradigm, we can include not only students but those who consume them, e.g., employers and graduate schools, as constituents. So, exactly who should be considered the stakeholders in our educational process? Here is our initial list:

The following is the initial list of constituents for consultation regarding what they want, see and/or attain from our program:

• CS&E Faculty (most importantly)
• The industry at large, with special attention to employers of our graduates.^1.1
• Graduate schools, with special attention to those who have considered and/or accepted our graduates
• Potential students and their parents.
• Current majors
• Current students taking requirements from us.
• Alumni
• Faculty of departments whose majors take our courses.
• families of majors (whom we treat as potential customers at recruitment time)
• the taxpayers of the state of California via their representatives in the legislature and on the board of regents.

Constituents can be surveyed, interviewed (say in focus groups), and assessed. Obviously, the feedback from these various constituencies will not carry the same weight. Also, different parts of the process will weight the respective constituencies differently.

It is the faculty who should set the goals of this department's instructional system but to be excellent that goal setting must be done in consultation with the other constituents.