There is a new book entitled “The Big Con,” by Marina Mazzucato and Rosie Collington, University College of London. In it you can read how experts lead companies astray.
It works like this: A new president comes in, s/he is immediately lobbied by so-called experts to fix things and away we go.
From the front page leading article on March 23, BCCC has fallen into the expert trap. Nowhere in the article is a problem identified that harms taxpayers or students. So we have a solution looking for a problem.
There is only one reference to making a substantive change: the reassigning of staff. Is the chemistry teacher now going to teach needlepoint, the home economics teacher to teach information technology?
The “material weaknesses” that have required this overhaul are only misclassifications. This has been going on since accounting was created, mostly to make profits look rosier for stockholders and less so for the IRS.
BCCC earns no profits and pays no taxes. It isn’t a business so it does not have to live by business credos. Read “The Big Con” and then find out how much these layers of expertise will cost, how much experience these experts have with community colleges, what those deliverables have been for its past customers, if any, and what the payoff is going to be for Bucks.
The expert fees and costs of change could easily exceed any possible benefits.
William Kirk, Doylestown
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