Changing Higher Education

How Learning Works

The bad news is that most data seem to show that students are not learning nearly so much in college as we would hope - or as we imagine is happening (see, e.g. Another study showing students are not learning). The good news is that learning research shows us how to improve those outcomes.  However, the additional bad news is that most academics have no idea what  the research says or, more important, what the research says should be done in a real classroom to get better learning. 

One of my collegues recently introduced me to an excellent book that seeks to remedy this last bit of bad news.   The book, How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching, describes seven crucial principles of learning, the research that supports those principles, and their implications for teaching. Each principle is made more concrete by a set of instructional strategies that can be used for its implementation.  The authors of this work are Susan Ambrose, Michael Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha Lovett, and Marie Norman.  and the book is based on approaches developed at the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon. 

**********

Learning results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn.

HERBERT A. SIMON

A New Culture of Learning

What happens to learning when we move from the stable infrastructure of the twentieth century to the fluid infrastructure of the twenty-first century, where technology is constantly creating and responding to change?

This critically important question provides the impetus for a thought provoking book entitled A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. The authors, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, have the perfect backgrounds and credentials to address this challenging question in a thoughtful, meaningful and provocative way.  Readers of this book will find a well thought out perspective of learning that is very different from the one which dominates all levels of education today. 

The authors start with the obvious - information abounds, it gets easier every day to get it, and the world (and consequently information) is changing more rapidly than ever before.  Along the way, they help us to recognize the multiple ways in which we all learn outside of the classroom through experiences of all kinds, with perhaps a bit of emphasis on play and failure. Through stories, they begin to draw out a description of a new culture of learning, one which involves using the new informational resources in a way that responds to personal needs, and results in sharing that experience in a way that helps to recreate the space of knowledge. 

Christensen on disruptive innovation in higher education

Regular readers of this blog know how often I call upon Clayton Christensen's ideas regarding disruptive innovation as described in The Innovators Dilemma. Christensen has now turned his focus to higher education in a superb, must read white paper called Disrupting College:How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Qualityand Affordability to Postsecondary Education , published by the Center for American Progress and the Innosight Institute. The report is coauthored with Michael B. Horn, Louis Soares, and Louis Caldera. This white paper does a great job of succinctly describing the challenges and issues facing American higher education today, outlining the concepts of disruptive innovation, and then applying those concepts to higher education.  

A major contribution to our understanding of for-profit higher education

As I went over the not-done parts of my “to do” list from 2008, I found that I had never gotten around to a post about an excellent book on for-profit higher education written by two of my USC colleagues, Bill Tierney and Gib Hentschke.  So although it is a year late - I want to comment on what is now not -so-new, but still excellent New Players, Different Game: Understanding the Rise of For-Profit Colleges and Universities, by William G. Tierney and Guilbert C. Hentschke.

Few issues in higher education produce more heat than the role of for-profit higher education.  Extreme positions abound, generally based on statements of high principle that are only marginally related to real conditions.  Rational discussions based on reality and facts are hard to find.   In this charged atmosphere, Tierney and Hentschke (T&H) have done an excellent job of providing an even-handed, broadly ranging discussion of for-profit higher education that is based on real data involving both for-profit and non-profit worlds of higher education
.
T&H begin by boldly stating on page 1 that “for-profit institutions represent a new, fundamentally distinct type of postsecondary education.” They then spend the next 200 pages comparing and contrasting the for-profit colleges and universities (FPCUs) with traditional non-profit colleges and universities (TCUs).  They look at customers, organization and governance, aspirations and missions, outcomes, etc. They describe strengths and weaknesses of each system with respect to a variety of  viewpoints and policy perspectives.  Importantly, throughout the book, T&H remind us that there is not “a” model either for FPCUs or for TCUs.  Rather, each system is notable for its considerable diversity in most of the parameters that they consider.

Along the way, they invoke Clayton Christensen’s powerful theory of disruptive technologies  to consider ongoing change within the TCUs as compared to the innovations being produced by the FPCUs.  In this context, T&H pose the theme for their work: “The question, then, is not simply whether for-profits are at work inventing and implementing disruptive technologies, but how these technologies will be manipulated and used in advancing a postsecondary education.” 

In order to answer this question, T&H consider the changing environment for higher education generally, and ways in which some of these changes have favored the for-profit sector. They provide solid data on growth in the for-profit sector - types of students, types of programs, degrees and certificates, revenues, etc.  They also look closely at differences in governance and finance between the two sectors, and how these differences drive many of the external aspects of the sectors. Important questions of  public policy relating to differing possible outcomes of higher education are raised and discussed at some length. 

The final chapter reinforces the five themes that have run through the book and that the authors believe will frame postsecondary education in the coming decades: the changing environment for higher education generally; innovation in higher education; issues of delivery and content; increasing amalgamation of cultures due to blurring borders between the FPCU and TCU sectors; and increasing differentiation between individual institutions.

Overall, this is an outstanding and, in many ways pathbreaking, contribution to our understanding of the ongoing evolution of postsecondary education in the United States.  I recommend it to all who are interested in more fully understanding the for-profit higher education sector.

How People Learn

 “A remarkable feature of American colleges is the lack of attention that most faculties pay to the  growing body of research about how much students are learning and how they could be taught to learn more.”
                Derek Bok

The Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education of the National Research Council put out a very useful book in 2000 called How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, that describes the conclusions of a lot of that learning research in a very concise and readable way. As indicated in A D- in science education, this is information that many faculty need to have.

The report begins by emphasizing - as Bok might - that “the world is in the midst of an extraordinary outpouring of scientific work on the mind and brain, on the processes of thinking and learning, on the neural processes that occur during thought and learning, and on the development of competence. The revolution in the study of the mind that has occurred in the last three or four decades has important implications for education.” (p.3)

Excess Intellectual Capacity

This post might well be titled The Many Pathways to Globalization II. As I thought about Suzanne Berger’s discussion in How We Compete regarding the need for corporations to have “excess capacity” –both in terms of production capabilities and research - in order to respond quickly to future opportunities, I realized I had heard some of that argument before in a very different, but not unrelated, context. In 1945, Vannevar Bush in his enormously influential report Science-The Endless Frontier, made a very closely related point in arguing for government support of basic university research.

Noting the critical contributions of science to the war effort, Bush argued that it was an appropriate role of government to create “scientific capital” which could improve the economy and enable the country to better defend itself should another war erupt. Creation of scientific capital encompassed both educating more people, and supporting high level research. Most interestingly, Bush believed this scientific capital must not be inspired by focusing on some societal problem that needed to be solved. Rather its creation should be driven by the interests and creativity of the researchers themselves. That is, research should be investigator initiated and driven. Bush defined this goal-independent, investigator initiated research as “basic”. Thus Bush’s scientific capital is similar on a broader scale to the excess intellectual capital that Berger suggests was critical to many of the corporate product innovations of the past decades -- knowledge created without constraints that it fit an immediate need, “warehoused” for use in an as-yet unknown circumstance.

The many pathways to globalization

    "Merchants have no country.  The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."
                                Thomas Jefferson

If one looks to the globalization of the corporate world as giving hints as to possible futures of higher education (I am certainly one of those), then How We Compete: What Companies Around The World Are Doing To Make It In Today’s Global Economy by Suzanne Berger is not to be missed. Professor Berger and her colleagues at the MIT Industrial Performance Center set out to study how individual corporations are actually responding to the pressures of globalization.   Over a five year period, they conducted interviews at over 500 companies of varying size worldwide.  They focused on sectors where underlying technologies are rapidly and on those where the underlying technologies are slowly changing. In the former, they looked at electronics and software, and in the latter, auto and auto parts and textile and apparel.  Their goal was to let data, rather than theory, drive conclusions about the impacts of globalization on corporations.  That is to say, this book is neither impressionistic nor evangelical, as are many of the other books looking at the effects of globalization, but rather is data driven.

Many contend that the forces of globalization are so huge and monolithic that all corporations will be forced to respond in a more-or-less uniform fashion. The results of this study argue strongly against that view. Indeed, the research team found an enormous divergence of strategies being used - apparently successfully - to respond to globalization. Over and over, they found multiple corporations in the same industry and generally the same geographic location using radically different routes to success. While they don’t claim to show that this divergence will be maintained into the future, they find no evidence that suggests that it cannot.

What happens if there is too much democracy?

Fareed Zakaria recently published a fascinating book about democracy called The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. Much of his discussion in the latter part of the book - the "Illiberal Democracy at Home" part- raises important questions regarding the possible futures of higher education in the US.

Zakaria begins with the powerful insight that the West, when it uses the term Ademocracy@ tends to mean a special type of democracy that is built on Aconstitutional liberalism@:

AFor people in the West, democracy means > liberal democracy=: a system marked not only by free and fair elections but also by the rule of law, a separation of powers, and the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion, and property.@

Disruptive Technologies: When Great Universities Fail?

Clayton Christensen's book, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail may have been read by more college and university administrators than any other business book of the last decade. It is easy to understand why, because there are some obvious parallels between the great firms that fail, and research universities.

Christensen looks at a very large set of corporations that were on everyone’s list of best run companies, leaders in their industry, that then lost their footing and in a very short time either disappeared or became almost irrelevant in their industry. He found that these companies failed because the management did a great job of analyzing their existing market, responded to the expressed desires of that market, and effectively allocated their investments to projects with the best return. They were so successful in handling the present that they were unable to see that innovations were occurring at the fringes of their industry that had the potential to completely restructure it. 

What has offshoring got to do with research universities?

Globalization is a fact of life for almost every large sector of the world economy. How this globalization will affect higher education is an ongoing theme of these blogs. One very visible component of globalization has been the outsourcing and offshoring movement. One generally thinks of this as a way to cut costs, and as such, this seems like a movement unrelated to the research and teaching missions of the university. However, a very interesting new book by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown, The Only Sustainable Edge, presents a different take on outsourcing and offshoring that could well have major implications for the way universities think about globalization.

Welcome to the Market-State

From time to time, I will bring to your attention some book that has greatly influenced my thinking about the future of research universities. One of these is The Shield of Achilles, by Philip Bobbitt, Knopf, 2002.   In the interests of full disclosure, I must state that Philip came to speak several times to the planning group drafting our 2004 Plan.

Bobbitt is the A. W Walker Centennial Chair of Constitutional Law at the University of Texas. He has also held academic positions at Oxford(history) and King's College (nuclear strategy), and served in several senior positions on the National Security Council. He brings this breadth of experience to bear in this book on a deep analysis of the evolution of constitutional order - the compact between the governors and the governed - from the early 1400's into the present.

Bobbitt is among those who believe that the constitutional arrangement called the nation-state is dying . The social compact of the nation-state, in Bobbitt's terms, calls for the state having as mission the improvement of the welfare of its people, and being accorded in return the ability to call on its citizens for sacrifice to preserve the state. Modern technologies, demographics, and markets have made this compact increasingly difficult to sustain, however. For example, States can no longer control their currencies, their economies, their borders, or their cultures. This does not signal the end of the State, however, but rather that a new constitutional order will appear - in fact, is already appearing.

From time to time, I will bring to your attention some book that has greatly influenced my thinking about the future of research universities. One of these is The Shield of Achilles, by Philip Bobbitt, Knopf, 2002.   In the interests of full disclosure, I must state that Philip came to speak several times to the planning group drafting our 2004 Plan.

Bobbitt is the A. W Walker Centennial Chair of Constitutional Law at the University of Texas. He has also held academic positions at Oxford(history) and King's College (nuclear strategy), and served in several senior positions on the National Security Council. He brings this breadth of experience to bear in this book on a deep analysis of the evolution of constitutional order - the compact between the governors and the governed - from the early 1400's into the present.

Bobbitt is among those who believe that the constitutional arrangement called the nation-state is dying . The social compact of the nation-state, in Bobbitt's terms, calls for the state having as mission the improvement of the welfare of its people, and being accorded in return the ability to call on its citizens for sacrifice to preserve the state. Modern technologies, demographics, and markets have made this compact increasingly difficult to sustain, however. For example, States can no longer control their currencies, their economies, their borders, or their cultures. This does not signal the end of the State, however, but rather that a new constitutional order will appear - in fact, is already appearing.