Barriers to innovation and change in higher education

I recently wrote an article entitled Barriers to Innovation and Change in Higher Education for the TIAA-CREF Institute.  In it, I used a business model perspective to analyze obstacles to change in higher education. This approach facilitates drawing in insights from research on change across a broad spectrum of organizations and industries. I won't try to reproduce the analysis presented in that article, but will just indicate a few my conclusions:

• Change generally is difficult, both for individuals and for institutions. Individuals are highly likely to resist change that puts them into new situations where their old skill sets may not suffice - where they may feel "deskilled" by the new situation. Institutions are composed of individuals, and so institutions reflect those individuals' general concerns about change. In addition, each institutions is characterized by its own business model in which all of the various components (resources and processes used to create a product, costs, and value of the product to consumers) work together in a delicately balanced interacting network. Major change in any of those components can throw the model out of balance with very negative consequences - a disruptive change. Thus the structure of institutions dictates that they generally accept only smaller, sustaining changes that don't force major change in the basic business model.  The types of sustaining change that is likely to be accepted is further constrained by concerns of key individuals: the managers in charge of institutions are unlikely to willingly accept changes that make them feel deskilled, even if the business model itself could easily adapt to those changes.
•  Very successful institutions can be particularly resistant to significant change. Although there are many reasons for this resistance, one key reason is that success leads to an internalization by the workers in the institution of the belief that key aspects of the business model define excellence. Changes in these key aspects (e.g some component of resource or process) then potentially becomes a step back from excellence; at the limit, the status quo of the business model defines excellence. American higher education has epitomized excellence worldwide for over a half century and thus has an exceptionally high level of internalization of business-model driven definitions of quality. (Levels not seen since those of the American auto industry in the 50's and 60's?)
• Higher education is a credence good, that is, its utility value is difficult for the consumer to determine before consumption and remains difficult to determine after consumption. Because of the difficulty in determining utility value, credence goods are typically valued through surrogates that can be more easily measured. For higher education, these surrogates are typically resources (number and research quality of faculty, quality of facilities, dollars expended per student etc.) and processes (breadth of curriculum, student services, acceptance rates, online or on campus, etc.).These credence good surrogates overlap significantly the internalized business-model driven definitions of excellence, thus providing a reinforcing obstacle to change. 
• The multiple missions of education, research and social growth of students mean that most institutions of higher education are actually utilizing multiple different generic types of business models simultaneously. This not only increases costs significantly, but creates important differences between brand and reputation that favor certain types of change over others. 
• Faculty traditionally control the educational process that is central to the higher education value proposition by defining, creating, and presenting the educational material used.  As such, faculty are both a key resource of the business model and also play a powerful role in the management of the organization. Understandably, most are resistant to ideas of major change that would decrease their centrality, and very often to more minor business model changes (e.g. in pedagogy) that might lead to their feeling deskilled. Faculty's dual role of major resource and management control is unusual in most business models.  
• Accreditation is carried out by member organizations, where the members are the institutions that are accredited. Quite naturally, the accreditors reflect the values of their member institutions. Accreditation standards and policies therefore focus on maintaining and increasing excellence as it is understood by the member institution. Thus accreditation generally serves to reinforce and support the business-model driven definitions of quality common to its institutional members.
• The Department of Education seems to be very hesitant to approve any new educational approaches that might be exploited by the for-profit sector. Unfortunately, this also denies the non-profit sector of new tools that are badly needed to meet sector challenges. 

I also talk about how certain trends, e.g. focus on outcomes assessment and increasing percentages of non-tenure track faculty, are likely to lead to a lowering of obstacles to change over time.  

For details, and many more arguments and conclusions, check out the entire report Barriers to Innovation and Change in Higher Education .   

Comments

[michael]

nice post

[crystal T]

Change, trends and issues in education are driven by globalization and globalization is driven by technology. The biggest trends in education is the introduction of computer technology and the rapid rate of innovation. The issue is technology has mandated continuous education in the work place and an exploitation of labor. The global perspective on continuing education is to know more, and on exploitation of labor, is to do more work. Knowing and doing more is a prerequisite to employment, while technology is a prerequisite to knowing and doing more. Although education can change the landscape of the workforce, it is outpaced by the changes of technology. Education has, by default, been charged with keeping up with the exploitation of labor through basic education, vocational training, and life skills and knowledge that have broad tendencies dynamically changing with socio-economic development.