From the issue dated January 7, 2000
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A Computer Game Lets You Manage the University'Virtual U' lacks space aliens, but its sophisticated modeling illustrates how colleges work By GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK
So how hard is it, really, to run a university? Sure, you have to balance professors' dreams for a talented student body and a bigger research budget against students' desires for small classes and smaller tuition increases.
If you have a computer, you can soon find out. The vehicle is a soon-to-be-released computer game called Virtual U, a commercial product modeled on the popular SimCity games. Developed by William F. Massy, a higher-education researcher at Stanford University, Virtual U doesn't have alien creatures holding sit-ins at the administration building or asteroids crashing into the stadium. There isn't even an animated governor blowing his top at a president for lavishing public money on a new building, although players do get to pick their fictional institutions' mascots from a menu that includes a kangaroo and a "friendly little devil." But the game, more than three years in the making and financed with nearly $1-million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, does provide a sophisticated financial and managerial model of how a university operates, emphasizing tradeoffs and relationships. In the game, as on a real campus, you can't raise merit-based financial aid for students without cutting into the available funds for need-based aid. And, as on most real campuses, the more a president promotes spending on athletics rather than academics, the faster faculty morale falls. "There's a lack of understanding about the systemic character of a university," says Mr. Massy, who created the game to change that. Books, he says, begin to do justice to the complexities, but not as well as "seeing before your eyes how the various parts fit together." Academics and administrators who have seen early versions of the simulation say it will be a valuable teaching tool for them. Rebecca Stafford, the president of Monmouth University, in New Jersey, says she might use the game to train some of her institution's senior administrators, "who often view the university from the one standpoint" they know best. She was an adviser to the game's creators early on, but hasn't seen more-recent versions. Henry Rosovsky, a former dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard University and the author of the 1991 book The University: An Owner's Manual, says he hasn't seen later incarnations of the game, but welcomes it in principle. "There are few tools that focus people on matters of governance" for a university, he says. Mr. Massy says he hopes Virtual U will be embraced by graduate students and used to train administrators and trustees. He and his co-creators also expect the game to have some general commercial appeal, although they acknowledge that, without aliens or a joystick, it may not be as immediately rewarding to play as some better-known products. "In terms of fun, it's not nearly at the level of SimCity," says Jesse Ausubel, a program officer at Sloan, who conceived of a university-management simulation at about the same time Mr. Massy did. Mr. Ausubel collaborated on the project and helped arrange the foundation's backing. While the game's entertainment value may depend on a player's idea of fun, Mr. Ausubel notes that it could help to improve the public's understanding of higher education. If the simulation catches on, the creators hope that communities of users will develop, and that they'll undertake improvements to the game, such as adding additional kinds of data or models of other college operations. For example, the game's creators would like it to include a medical school and teaching hospital. Sloan, which holds rights to the game, plans to make the source code for the game publicly available to foster add-ons. A World Wide Web site (https://www.virtual-u.org), with a demonstration of the game, should also be up and running by the end of this month. The version of Virtual U that is expected to be available in March was designed by Trevor Chan, the president of Enlight Software, in Hong Kong, and the creator of a simulation of corporate America called Capitalism. Digitalmill, a company in Portland, Me., is helping to market it. Developers expect the game to sell for about $129, with a scaled-down version to cost between $60 and $70. Virtual U is based on data from 1,200 institutions and on a number of studies from organizations like the College Board, the Institute for Higher Education Research at the University of Pennsylvania, and Mr. Massy's consulting company, the Jackson Hole Higher Education Group. (He lives in Jackson Hole, Wyo.) Players can follow two approaches to Virtual U. If they choose the "Scenario" game, they are presented with one of 10 challenges, such as eliminating a budget deficit without jeopardizing academic quality, or allocating a $200-million gift in the most effective manner. Or they can choose to play a "Custom" game, in which they are given a general picture of their institution and gain points for taking steps that improve it while staying solvent. For either format, players decide what kind of institution they want to preside over: a private research university, a liberal-arts college, a public research university, or a comprehensive university. The choice determines hundreds of game settings, starting with the size of the player's campus and the kinds of facilities it has. In a custom game, players can also specify characteristics like the sorts of academic departments they want; whether the institution draws students nationally, regionally, or locally; the proportion of the student body that receives a degree in five years; the level of sponsored research; and the institution's athletics conference. Players compete against the computer, not each other. They can, however, compare their progress with that of others by seeing how their scores stack up in the game's Hall of Fame. And while the object of the game is simple -- leave the institution in better shape than you found it -- accomplishing that goal is anything but. For one thing, the game assumes that a player understands how a university works and what a president can, and cannot, control. For instance, players trying to change the overall composition of the faculty cannot fire professors. But they can change the criteria used to hire new ones. Then, as the game progresses, the makeup of the faculty gradually changes. Likewise, players can't just ask for a big gift and get it. But if they increase the budget for fund raising, the volume of annual giving will grow over time. In such cases, as with the hundreds of other decisions a player might make, the consequences are based on analyses of real colleges' operations. And Mr. Massy says he tried not to skip much. The game models such factors as endowment performance, based on basic portfolio theory; the costs of capital construction, based on estimates from facilities' managers; and enrollment trends, based on studies of student attrition. It also lets players select such factors as their institution's level of prestige, whether it has an urban or rural setting, and its academic emphasis -- such as science versus liberal arts. The game adjusts play accordingly. While players can't hire or fire individual faculty members, the game randomly creates models for each of the institution's professors -- along with their specific research interests, success in attracting grants, and academic ranks. Then, as players make choices affecting those faculty members -- by lowering the priority for spending in their departments, say -- Virtual U adjusts the behavior of the affected professors. "We made a conscious judgment to put a lot of stuff in it," says Mr. Massy, who estimates that he spent about two years, on and off, compiling the mathematical models that drive the game. The complexity of the models is one reason the game doesn't offer spectacular animations and graphics. Cramming in much more than the basics would have slowed down the complex calculations that the software performs every time a player makes a decision. (To run the game, players need a computer using the Windows 95 or Windows 98 operating system. It doesn't run on Windows NT, but should run on the new version of that, Windows 2000. Macintosh versions of the game may follow.) The low-graphics nature of the game is also in character with how a university operates. In SimCity, notes Mr. Massy, players do things more "physically." But "the spatial relationships in a university aren't really what matter," he says, except to the campus architects and planners -- and they aren't part of Virtual U. Instead, Virtual U focuses on what matters most -- the finances. It is on the revenue and budgeting screens where a player/president has the greatest influence. Before the start of each academic year, players can decide what the pool of salary money will be, what the endowment spending rate will be, and how much to increase tuition. Then they set priorities for allocating the resources and establishing targets -- and see how things turn out. "You probably cannot hit all your targets simultaneously," says Mr. Massy. Typically, a player might tinker with the settings a few times to see how they might work out before setting the game in motion. "It's just like you're interacting with your budget office," he says. For players who lack experience running a college, a "Getting Started" strategy guide -- written by Neil J. Salkind, a professor of psychology at the University of Kansas -- provides advice on key relationships, such as how reducing a department's teaching loads can lower student morale, because more students find themselves closed out of courses. Mr. Salkind likens playing the game to a "virtual internship." The developers note, however, that it is designed to illustrate campus-management issues, and not as a tool for actually running a college. Players can't plug in specific statistics -- although, as Mr. Massy says, "You can make your game institution more like Colgate than, say, Stanford." But while any computer model of a complex organization is inherently limited, Mr. Massy says he took pains to make the assumptions in Virtual U as realistic as possible. For example, he says, if a player's institution is a liberal-arts college and the player starts pushing for grants, "you wouldn't have nearly as much response as a research university" would. "And if you do it from an English department or classics, you're not going to have as much luck as will electrical engineering." In the custom game, Virtual U also throws players some curve balls, the virtual equivalents of Chance cards in Monopoly: a big crime on campus, a devastating earthquake, a big plunge in the stock market, a drug scandal involving athletes. They're "the kinds of things that presidents get woken up for in the middle of the night," says Mr. Salkind. Few actions lack consequences. For example, a president of a financially strapped institution who decides to raise the overhead rate for research -- which determines how much of a grant goes to the institution for its costs -- will find that the game has exacted a price by decreasing the morale of professors who win the most grants, and, perhaps, encouraging the most prolific of them to leave. That, in turn, depresses the player's score. Adding faculty members is another move with consequences. As more professors are hired, the president will need to devote more of the budget to building new facilities -- including new parking garages -- or be punished with declining scores for faculty morale, educational quality, and research performance. Mr. Massy says some professors who teach about higher education have already told him they're interested in the game. He says he also hopes the game will generate some sympathy for presidents and others who manage universities -- especially from faculty members, "who kind of think administrators do things by magic." But Mr. Salkind, a faculty member at Kansas for 17 years, says he had a slightly different reaction: "It makes you say, 'Thank God I'm not an administrator.'"
https://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Page: A51
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