Graduate Student Services - The Delivery of Services at Locations Where Students Matriculate - Dissertation Example

This theory is tested by a review of the literature of the goals of graduate students and the difficulties they have in meeting those goals and how graduate students are required to respond to and identify those difficulties. The researcher also conducted a survey in which approximately five thousand six hundred students were participants. The survey was designed to solicit information from the participants relative to their preferred method for the delivery of graduate student services. This dissertation concludes with the finding that contrary to the literature review, graduate students at these three institutions did not have a preference for a decentralized system of delivery of graduate student services.

At the end of the twentieth century, there was an aggressive move toward organization modification in post-secondary education institutions (Komives and Woodard 2003, p. 340). These changes were obviated by the growing tendency for education to seek structural and managerial precedents from the business community. Regardless of the tenuous similarities between businesses and universities, the more educational institutions begin to look like businesses, the more relevant business-like approaches to institutional problems are required (Birnbaum 2000).

To this end, restructuring and reinvention are entirely important to institutions of higher education. Reinvention and restructuring are required in institutions of higher learning because ultimately, there are a number of systems in these institutions in which management is devoid of authority. Complicating matters, these systems provide an array of specialist services requiring complex tasks with relatively stable structures (Birnbaum 2000).Some insight can be gained from secondary sources.

For example, Komives and Woodard (2003), referring to a survey conducted by the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators in 1996 and 1998, concluded that while conventional student services continue to be delivered, there have been important modifications.