Changing Higher Education

Do Australia's public universities have a future?

I recently ran into a very interesting article by Glyn Davis, Vice Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, entitled The rising phoenix of competition: what futures for Australia’s public universities? It appeared in the Autumn 2006 edition of the Griffith Review. Davis is a very thoughtful higher education leader who tries to peer into the future of higher education in Australia. A number of his other presentations can be found on the University of Melbourne "Speeches" site

In this article, Davis gives a very nice sketch of the history and present organization and status of higher education in Australia. He describes government policies that have tended to force all of Australian higher education (both public and private) into a Humboltian model of the research university.   He also explains how government funding policies have pushed Australian universities to aggressively search out international students. Then, backing off to take a more global (literally) view, he describes the internal and external forces that are making this model unsustainable.

His perspective is particularly worthwhile since Australia has been perhaps the most aggressive country in reaching out to international students both at home and abroad- what might be seen as the first stage of globalization of higher education.  Davis's concerns focus on the effects of increasing competition and educational innovation that globalization will bring to bear on the Australian model as globalization of higher education moves on to the next stage.

Offshoring moves up the education ladder

The Los Angeles Times reported on March 6, 2006 that advanced education is providing less of a buffer against offshoring than had been supposed. The article quotes Alan Blinder, a Princeton economics professor and former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve, as estimating that one-third of the total jobs in the US were susceptible to offshoring. Regarding the role of education in providing protection, he is quoted, “More education has been the right answer for the past decades, but I am not so convinced that it is the right course” for coping with the upheavals of globalization. (See related article by Blinder in Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006)

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. 

How about distance learning?

Distance learning (DL) took on new importance with the rise of the internet. It was suddenly possible to reach students 24/7 at any location in the world. Would DL be a disruptive innovation (in the Christensen sense, see Disruptive Technologies: When Great Universities Fail?, March 3, 2006 ) in higher education? What use might traditional universities and colleges make of DL? How would for-profit higher education utilize this new tool and how might universities respond?

In early 2000, I wrote a piece Distance Learning: Challenges and Questions to inform our trustees of some issues and opportunities in this area. This later developed into an article published in Change 32, 20 (2000), and one should read the Change article as it went somewhat beyond my piece for the trustees. Although the internet world has changed a lot since 2000, most of the questions and issues I discussed in these articles are still pertinent.

Competitive Higher Education

Research universities have traditionally been protected by a “moat” created by a value structure that produced very high barriers to entry for new players, and discouraged rapid change. Although that moat is still deep, there are numerous developments taking place that could ultimately remove the moat and introduce real multi-player competition into higher education.

I presented a keynote address at a conference at USC in November 2000 that was organized by our Center for Higher Education Analysis entitled A New Game in Town: Competitive Higher Education. That talk later was expanded and revised and published by Information, Communication & Society, 4:4 , p. 479-506 (2001), and in a companion book Digital Academe: the New Media and Institutions of Higher Education and Learning, eds. Dutton, William H. and Loader, Brian D. Chapter 6. (Routledge, 2002). Interested readers should consult the later, more complete versions of the manuscript. 

For Profit and/or Non Profit future?

How do views on the future of higher education held by for-profit and non-profit universities differ? What aspirations do they hold in common, and where do their differences lie? Where do for-profits have an advantage over the non-profits?

I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to discuss some of these and other issues with Douglas Becker, Chairman and CEO of Laureate Education, Inc. as part of our joint presentation of the 2004 Earl V. Pullias lecture at USC.  The title of our presentation was Higher Education and the Global Marketplace: Entrepreneurial Activity in a Dynamic Environment.

 

How do views on the future of higher education held by for-profit and non-profit universities differ? What aspirations do they hold in common, and where do their differences lie? Where do for-profits have an advantage over the non-profits?

I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to discuss some of these and other issues with Douglas Becker, Chairman and CEO of Laureate Education, Inc. as part of our joint presentation of the 2004 Earl V. Pullias lecture at USC.  The title of our presentation was Higher Education and the Global Marketplace: Entrepreneurial Activity in a Dynamic Environment.