By Yihang Xu

The Center for Learning Strategy Support (CLSS) is a major academic support service provider within the University of Toronto (UofT). Its focus is on helping students improve their learning habits and academic outcomes. During my interviews with the learning strategists there, I found that they frequently use the word “scale” to describe their institutional service provision strategy, which is counterintuitive and revealing.

The concept of “scale” or “scaling” is traditionally associated with business, referring to strategies for increasing revenue using limited resources without adding significant costs (Csiszar, 2022). However, CLSS adopts this concept in a not-for-profit, academic context. While universities are traditionally considered public institutions serving the common good, adopting business-world practices seems “natural” for the professionals at CLSS. Interestingly, CLSS is not tasked with generating revenue, as it is fully funded by the university and provides free services to students. For CLSS, “scale” instead means maximizing limited budgets, staff (primarily learning strategists), and time to serve the large student population of 70,000 at UofT.

One learning strategist shared, “I think one-on-one is a great way to do that because then you can see the student further, hold their whole self. Um, but we also have to scale and make decisions for 70,000 students.” One-on-one appointments used to be the cornerstone of CLSS’s services but have proven impractical and resource-intensive. To address these challenges, CLSS has expanded its offerings to include workshops and group programs that use existing resources more efficiently to reach more students. While these scalable services allow CLSS to assist a broader audience, they also highlight the tension between personalized academic support and the need for institutional efficiency.

The drive to scale academic support services reflects a broader trend in higher education’s marketization. As universities increasingly rely on tuition fees for operations, education has come to be seen as an investment by students as fee-payers and consumers. Institutions, in turn, prioritize meeting student expectations as part of a consumer-driven ethos (Tomlinson 2017, 453). This includes providing transparent, measurable value for tuition fees, which places pressure on service units like CLSS to balance accessibility with resource constraints. Using “scale” at CLSS echoes corporate efficiency strategies, aligning with a marketized logic where limited resources are optimized to maximize provision (Tomlinson 2017, 457).

This approach underscores the dual pressures facing CLSS: meeting the insatiable demand for academic support while addressing the institutional drive for operational efficiency. As one informant noted, “The demand can never be met.” Yet, even though not all students know and need them, there are still a lot of them depending on their services, so scaling up becomes a practical and ethical imperative. This balancing act reflects the broader tensions in higher education today, where student-consumer expectations and institutional constraints increasingly reshape traditional practices and values, even for those in-house academic support departments (Tomlinson 2017, 463).

Bibliography

Csiszar, John. 2022. “What Does It Mean To Scale a Business?” July 27 at 03:34 PM (EDT). 

Tomlinson, Michael. 2017. “Student Perceptions of Themselves as ‘consumers’ of Higher Education.” 

British Journal of Sociology of Education 38 (4): 450–67.