Changing Higher Education

“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds"

John Maynard Keynes

 

The world is changing rapidly, driven by powerful forces such as economics, politics, demographics, religion and technology.  We have seen enormous increases in globalization over the past few decades that have transformed how we do business, how we live, and how our governments function. 

American universities have been affected only marginally by these powerful forces thus far, but it is difficult to imagine that they will not be changed in significant, perhaps radical, ways  over the next few decades.  This website is dedicated to discussion and analysis of the forces coming to bear on higher education, and of ways in which higher education might proactively and effectively use these forces to increase its impact.

“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds"

John Maynard Keynes

 

The world is changing rapidly, driven by powerful forces such as economics, politics, demographics, religion and technology.  We have seen enormous increases in globalization over the past few decades that have transformed how we do business, how we live, and how our governments function. 

American universities have been affected only marginally by these powerful forces thus far, but it is difficult to imagine that they will not be changed in significant, perhaps radical, ways  over the next few decades.  This website is dedicated to discussion and analysis of the forces coming to bear on higher education, and of ways in which higher education might proactively and effectively use these forces to increase its impact.

“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds"

John Maynard Keynes

 

The world is changing rapidly, driven by powerful forces such as economics, politics, demographics, religion and technology.  We have seen enormous increases in globalization over the past few decades that have transformed how we do business, how we live, and how our governments function. 

American universities have been affected only marginally by these powerful forces thus far, but it is difficult to imagine that they will not be changed in significant, perhaps radical, ways  over the next few decades.  This website is dedicated to discussion and analysis of the forces coming to bear on higher education, and of ways in which higher education might proactively and effectively use these forces to increase its impact.

Knowledge Management: an expanded role for higher ed in a changing world

In a post back in 2006 entitled What business are we in?, I suggested that a broader definition of the business of higher education might be Knowledge Management. At the time, the pieces were not in place to envisage how such a definition might usefully extend the roles of the university. Some key pieces now seem to be in place. Lifelong post- baccalaureate learning has become a career necessity for an ever-increasing number of workers; employers are struggling to hire and retain employees with skill sets needed to meet challenges and opportunities created by rapidly developing technologies and pressures of globalization; the development of competency based stackable modules has opened up the potential for just-in-time learning that meets career needs of learners and simultaneously fits with knowledge needs of employers; and the centrality of the traditional academic degree hierarchy is being challenged by development of competency-based descriptions of workforce needs. The present COVID -19 upheaval of life in general has upended the job market, and the eventual recovery of the economy can perhaps be facilitated by a universities playing a more expansive role in meeting knowledge needs of industry. This post considers how a Knowledge Management role for universities might be envisaged today.

 

 

Free college tuition is a lovely, but dangerous idea

"Free college tuition" is rapidly becoming a rallying cry in the permanent presidential campaign which now drives all policy discussions. It is easy to understand why. Tuition and fees in both the public and private sectors of higher education have been climbing much more rapidly than inflation and family income for over four decades. Even families well up in the middle class are finding the cost of higher education increasingly prohibitive, greatly limiting educational choice and opportunity. Higher education debt has become one of the largest debt categories for individuals and families, and is negatively impacting career choices, initial home ownership, automobile purchases, etc. The heart of the American Dream- educational and economic mobility-is threatened. 

This issue of educational and economic mobility is indeed critical,and deserves to be at the center of  serious policy discussions. The problem is that free college tuition,as catchy and simple and attractive as the idea is, is not a viable solution to that problem in any proposal that I have seen.

The high cost of funded research in colleges and universities

A college or university that does research ends up spending considerable resources of its own even when most of its research is “funded”. How and why is this the case, and where does the institution look to find the resources needed to cover this unfunded research cost? Undergraduate tuition seems like one likely source.

 

These internal research expenditures fall into two categories, which I will call “open” and “hidden”. As these terms may suggest, the first is a set of costs that are reported nationally by the NSF and consequently appear in numerous reports put out by the institutions themselves. On the other hand, hidden costs are well known, but seldom openly discussed even thought they contribute very significantly to the institutional cost of research .

California still not addressing the workforce gap - plus ca change

Five years ago in a post, I described a thesis study by Lauren Cooper on potential solutions to the looming workforce gap in California. Her analysis was based primarily on projections of California workforce needs in 2025 made by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). Dr Cooper's analysis of the CSU - level workforce shortfall suggested that CSU needed to open 12 new campuses by 2025 to meet needs - an unlikely solution to the problems given the finances of California.

PPIC has just published an updated California workforce projection, this time aiming at 2030 needs. The new projections are similar to the earlier ones:

Our projections indicate that the demand for college graduates will outpace the supply by 2030, if current trends continue. The gap is substantial, with the economy needing 1.1 million more college graduates than the state will produce. But if the state, its educational institutions, and its people are able to improve educational outcomes, California and its residents will experience a much more successful future, with higher incomes, greater tax revenues, and lower use of social services.

Pretty much what we saw 5 years ago. Very few steps have been taken over this period to improve the situation, despite some strong efforts by Governor Brown to create movement.

The key to a better future for California residents is obviously the California public university sector. Thus far, that sector has proclaimed loudly and consistently that it cannot increase the number of graduates significantly without proportional increases in budget, i.e. it cannot find more effective and more efficient ways of educating students. This position is of very questionable merit, since numerous institutions around the country have rethought their educational approaches in order to increase participation without sacrificing educational outcomes - and in many cases have improved educational outcomes in the process.

But the bottom line remains, California's future prosperity is largely in the hands of a public higher education system that thus far has fiercely and successfully defended the status quo, supported by regents who view their job to be to protect the university rather than the State and its citizens. Surely, there is a responsible adult somewhere in the mix.

MIT's self-disruption: an update

In The future of MIT undergraduate education: a case study of disruption, I described two reports from MIT that laid out a stunning vision for the future of MIT undergraduate education. Among the suggestions of the reports are that education of the future will be unbundled and disaggregated, with online components enabling flexible time scales and location-independent participation. The second and final of the two reports calls for, among other things, bold experimentation to realize the vision,  and a recommendation that MIT move forward to consider the types of certifications that can be supported through MITx and edX. 

MIT recently announced a very interesting new program that embodies these two aspects of these reports: a new twist to MIT's one year Master's in Supply Chain Management. This modified degree program is, in effect, modularized and disaggregated. The first semester's courses will be available through edX, enabling students around the world to access them for free. Students who do well in the courses, pass a proctored exam and pay a small certification fee will be awarded a new MITx MicroMaster's certificate. For those students who want to continue with the full Master's program, the MicroMaster's greatly enhances the likelihood of acceptance into the on-campus program. Accepted students could then complete the Master's in one semester on campus.  MIT describes this as an example of "inverted" admissions in which students first try the courses, then apply for admission: 

Inverted admission has the potential to disrupt traditional modes of access to higher education....We’re democratizing access to a master’s program for learners worldwide.

Students who enter the program in this way will be charged only for their one semester on campus, saving half the price of the traditional program.

One can only imagine that MIT views this as a way to do a great study of the effectiveness of their brand of online learning versus traditional classroom learning: which group of students does the best in the second semester?  And what of the student demographics? Does this approach bring increased geographic or gender diversity to the class?

When the reports referred to above were first released, Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX and Professor at MIT, imagined a future MIT where freshmen would spend the first year taking on line courses, then come to campus for (most of) the remainder of their degree. This new program also should be providing useful data for considerations of that future.

Finally, the MITx MicroMaster's itself is an important step. This is a credential that MIT expects will have career value for those who have earned it. That is, employers will value it and reward its holders appropriately. Thus, the program is structured so that it can create value even for those students who decide not to continue to the Master's.  In addition, MIT is actively discussing with other universities the possibility of having the MicroMaster's convertable into credits in their own Master's programs. In other words, MIT is hard at work creating a name brand for its MITx MicroMaster's:

"The new MicroMaster’s is an important modular credential for the digital age, and promises to serve as academic currency in a continuous, lifelong-learning world,” says Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. “It also affords an evolutionary path for universities in the face of mounting costs, and a way to leverage technology to blend online and on-campus learning pathways.”

Is this the beginning of the creation of a second brand at MIT?

 

"Baumol's cost disease" is the answer to a different question

In 1966, William Baumol and William Bowen looked at the origins of rising salaries for live performances (music, theater, dance), and noted that an underlying issue was that such performances could not easily be made more efficient - productivity could not be increased (Baumol and Bowen, Wikopedia). The oft-quoted ( and quite convincing) formulation of this concept is that a Beethoven quartet must be performed by exactly the same number of musicians today as was required in the 19th century, and that the quartet requires roughly the same amount of time to perform. No increase in productivity over two centuries! This inability to increase productivity should, according to simple economic arguments, lead to flat incomes - rising income usually is a result of increased productivity. However, despite this, salaries in the performing arts had risen over time. Baumol and Bowen concluded that this occurred because it was necessary to keep salaries on a par with those in industries that were seeing productivity increases in order to keep workers in the performing arts. This "push" of salaries in industries without productivity increases is called Baumol's cost disease.

Very often, when someone poses the troubling question, " why is college so expensive?", the response is simply "Baumol's cost disease", said with an authority that suggests that should settle the discussion. In fact, used in this way, Baumol's cost disease is like the magician's gesture that is designed to get the audience's attention away from place where something important is happening. In reality, customer's don't care about the cost of making a product, they are concerned about the price they must pay, and that difference leads one down a potentially fruitful path of reflection about both Baumol's formulation, and critical issues in higher education.

Whither alternative (and improved) credentialing?

I recently served on a panel at a meeting organized by the California Higher Education Innovation Council to look at "Alternative Credentials and Unbundling the Degree: Meeting Employer Needs or Short-Circuiting Proven Approaches?" Our panel was challenged beforehand by its moderator, Ryan Craig, to imagine how conditions had to change over the next decade in order for alternative credentialing ("e.g. nanodegrees and badges" according to the meeting invitation) to become a major force in higher education. I will make no attempt to review the many arguments advanced on this subject at the meeting, but simply describe some of my own thoughts (however tentative) that were stimulated by this challenge.

There are obviously three broad constituencies interested in questions of higher education credentialing: students, government, and employers. My belief is that the most important of these in determining whether alternative credentialing takes hold will be employers: if employers find it truly useful, most students will enthusiastically sign on, and government will see little reason to block something that employers and students find to be of real value. 

Arizona State University and edX open a new frontier- maybe

Arizona State University (ASU) and edX recently announced a joint project to offer an online freshman year with full official credit from ASU - The Global Freshman Academy:

“We’re going to have 12 new courses, of which students will take eight,” Mr. Crow (President of ASU) said. “They have to be constructed at a fantastic level of digital immersion, not just talking heads. This is a general education freshman year, not a series of disconnected courses, so they have to be thought through together.”

All courses will be designed and taught by leading faculty at ASU. Whether the Department of Education bugaboo of competency based testing will be used is not clear from information I have seen. 

This is truly an "open admissions" program, with no entrance requirements. Students pay nothing to take the courses, only paying after successful course completion if they desire to get ASU credit. Projected cost for the credit will be no more than $200 per credit hour. The combination of relatively low cost, online accessibility and convenience, and college credit from a major institution certainly make this a great experiment, and may well make this a very successful program. 

Cost allocation in the research university and what it tells us

Universities often report a number that appears to indicate how much the university spends on instruction. We might believe that this number accurately represents teaching expenses and even do some analysis based on that belief. We would be wrong to do so. 

John V. Lombardi, in How Universities Work

This somewhat cynical observation by Lombardi was informed by his broad and sometimes painful experiences as Provost at Johns Hopkins University, President of the University of Florida, Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and President of the Louisiana State University System. However, in these times of heated discussions over who should pay for higher education and a background of rapidly increasing student debt,  it is important to have some idea of what the actual costs of producing that education are. In this post, I review some of the reasons why it is difficult to define the instructional costs at a research university, and why various constituencies might not want that information to be generally available. After discussing how a business model view simplifies some of the issues around calculating instructional costs, I describe a recent analysis of such costs in the University of California system, which reaches some surprising conclusions. These conclusions lead to a consideration of why cost -shifting between missions is so important in the current approach of the research university. Taken together, these results suggest that one of the key issues that should be focused on in order to control higher education prices are the synergies between the different functions of the research university and the actual "added value" to the customer of those synergies. In particular, the analysis suggests that rising prices in undergraduate education are not likely be controlled unless society finds alternative ways to fund a significant component of the cost of university research. 

An update on StraighterLine - a "disruptor in the making"?

A few years ago, I identified a few organizations that I thought were doing things in higher education that were examples of approaches that potentially could be disruptive to the field (Potential disruptions in the higher education space). Among these is StraighterLine, which offers primarily introductory level college courses much more inexpensively and flexibly than traditional colleges and universities.  Entry level courses are relatively similar in many if not most colleges, and at the same time are the most profitable for the colleges because they are most often taught in large classes. If students in large numbers were to opt for the StraighterLIne combination of online convenience and low cost, it would prove quite disruptive to the budgets of many traditional institutions.