Institutional and Behavioral Economics

HARAMAYA UNIVERSITY, COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE

School of Agricultural Economics

Institutional and Behavioural Economics Assignment

Ararsa Abera/SGS/434/10
1. Identify a set of rules in your organization that you are familiar with.
Questions 2. Discuss how these rules are implemented and any challenge associated with
them.
3. Suggest, if any, whether the rules should change or continue to operate.

As it is supposed to apply to all tertiary education in Ethiopia, Haramaya University follows

the rule of the country regarding the maximum credit load per instructor. Accordingly, the
maximum credit hour an instructor should bear is stipulated by the ministry of education to
be 12 credits. This rule can affect both academics as well as research and community
engagement goals achievement of the university.

Haramaya University, as a higher institution in the country has a vision to be one of the
reputable Universities in East Africa in 2025. This could only be realised if the prevalence of
the quality education is assured in the University. Given the high and increasing staff
turnover of the University may be due to its location or any other else, the staff is carrying 12
credit load in some colleges; example College of Business and Economics. This is too much
and difficult to control. The instructor may lack enough time to prepare himself and forced to
focus only on course coverage with less in depth discussion with students. In addition,
continuous assessment student evaluation policy of the university that needs a plenty of time
to implement is also unbelievable to be properly applied with an instructor under a burden of
the maximum credit. This will have the adverse effect on the delivery of quality education to
the students of the University.

The other hazard with this rule in Haramaya University is on the research and community
engagement program of the university. The university can proceed up stair to excellence
when it stood out with its cutting edge research and innovations. This in turn requires the
calibre staffs updating themselves day to day with the ever evolving knowledge market. I
think, the rule regarding credit load in Haramaya University does not allow for that.
Instructors are exhausted as they are busy with routine work of course load and are obliged to
divert themselves from self updating. This will cause the university if not solved timely to
lack capable and well equipped staffs in the near future and again make the university
incompetent in research and innovation even with the local universities in Ethiopia.

These two major effects of the rule make staffs disadvantaged relative to staffs of universities
of central part of the country. This is because, due to good strategic location and associated
advantages, universities in the central part of the country have attracted many staffs possessed
a good staff profile. The load in these universities is shared among greater number of staffs
and let them with less course load which favours staffs to take time to specialize and work on

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 Institutional and Behavioral Economics

their capacity building. Less course load may make instructors to concentrate on their
specialization and become productive in teaching as well as research which reward them a
heartfelt career satisfaction. What we are practically witnessing in our university is far away
from that and everybody is looking around for opportunities to escape from the university.
Staffs are mostly not willing to contract with the University for further Study, which is
evidence from few numbers of PhDs in many departments’ staff profile which are older than
even other universities in the country currently having a lot of PhDs. Larger percentage are
leaving with MSc/MA after they finished the four year contract and many of the colleges in
the university are teaching with Graduate Assistants being loaded with up to 12 credits whose
impact on education quality is not unpredictable.

Thus, this rule in addition to other subsidiary measures should be revised and minimized, I
think to a maximum of 6 credits per staff, especially for universities like Haramaya
University which are located far from the centre of the country. This change is inevitable as
the impact will be getting worse because the supply of staff is unstable and the staff turnover
is very high which will soon weakens the university if change will not be made. This is the
principle that follows the induced institutional change theory, as the demand for staff
outweighs the supply and the change to the rule is one of the measures to balance the supply
and demand of staff of the university.

THE END

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