Changing Higher Education

Futurelearn -a UK entry into the universe of MOOCs

MOOCs such as edX, Coursera, and Udacity have obviously caught the attention of the higher education world,  In large part, the excitement has been generated by the participation in these ventures of many of the 800 pound gorillas of US research universities (e.g.Harvard, MIT, Stanford and UC Berkeley). Suddenly, the highest elites of the US university world are plunging into online learning!

Consequently, one might be excused for looking askance at the recent headline in the Times Higher Education:

Open university launches British Mooc platform to rival US providers

Given that this MOOC (Futurelearn) does not include the 800 pound gorillas of the UK research university world such as Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial College, how could Futurelearn have the weight to rival "our" MOOCs? **

Why manufacturing may be important to innovation

The January/February issue of technology review (TR) and the March issue of the Harvard Business Review  (HBR) both contain fascinating  articles on the relationship between innovation and manufacturing that point out significant problems with the generally accepted view of globalization.  Since both globalization and innovation are important for higher education, this new discussion provides additional background for some of the major issues discussed in this blog.

Globalization, as generally defined, involves modularization of product creation, production and sales, with individual modules being carried out wherever on the globe they can "best" be performed - where "best" will be defined according to different criteria by different companies (see post Globalization and Internationalization). However, in many industries a typical result has been to offshore the manufacturing component of the process in search of production that is cheaper than domestic production.

Too many American companies base decisions about how to source manufacturing largely on narrow financial criteria, never taking into account the potential strategic value of domestic locations. Proposals for plants are treated like any other investment proposal and subjected to strict return hurdles. Tax, regulatory, intellectual property, and political considerations may also figure heavily in the conversation. But executives, viewing manufacturing mainly as a cost center, give short shrift to the impact that outsourcing or offshoring it may have on a company’s capacity to innovate. Indeed, most don’t consider manufacturing to be part of a company’s innovation system at all.

Multiple views of globalization of higher education and of place

I had the pleasure of attending the Laureate International Universities' annual Leadership Summit last June.  As readers of this blog know, Laureate is a for-profit corporation that runs a world wide network of higher education institutions, both brick-and-mortar and online. Laureate is one of my potential disruptors. Not surprisingly, while listening to some of the talks at the Summit, I found myself musing about some of the very different ways that various players in higher education are conceptualizing globalization, and how this was related to the place-based identity of most higher education institutions.

I have written about what I called the place-based identity of higher education institutions, and how it impacts globalization efforts. Most higher education institutions were created in response to local needs, typically with funding either from individuals of the area or local (or state) government.  They initially served primarily students from their surrounding regions. Thus, they responded to the special contexts of their regions - they were place-based both physically through their campus and also programmatically through their focus on response to local conditions and needs . As time went on, the contexts of regions changed and became more complicated, and successful institutions responded to those changes, keeping in step with those changing regional contexts. In addition, some institutions began to view themselves as national, not regional, institutions and so the context to which they were responding became much larger and national in scope. However, the simpler, geographic component - the campus- of place-based identity generally did not change in any significant way. Most institutions continued to maintain one main campus right where it started. If there were offshoots, they were generally small and designed to better serve their region. This maintaining of the original campus as the "main campus" further connects today's institutions to their origins even as they change to respond to new contexts.  

Carl Camden and Michael Spence on the future of employment

The most recent McKinsey Quarterly (registration required) has a very interesting pair of interviews entitled The US Employment Challenge: Perspectives from Carl Camden and Michael Spence. Both of these relate to the question I have posed in  several posts - how do we need to be educating our students so that they can excel in this rapidly changing world?  

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Carl Camden, CEO of Kelly Services brings a though-provoking perspective to the subject of the changing nature of work and employment. He argues that we have generally not recognized the myriad implications of the increasingly short job cycle - the time for a job to appear and disappear, either in terms of a location or a whole category of jobs.  One of the major consequences is an increase in free-agent workers:

So jobs aren’t permanent, locations aren’t permanent, and workers are returning back to what I would call a free-agent type of work style. Independent contractors, part-time employees who move in and out of the workforce, temporary employees, consultants who move in and out of the workforce—that group of individuals in most of the industrialized world is already 25 to 35 percent of the workforce, on its way to becoming 50 percent of the workforce, I think, over the next decade.

Potential disruptors in the higher education space

As regular readers of this blog know, I have been using Clayton Christensen's concept of disruptive innovation to frame issues in higher education since 2006 (Disruptive technologies: when great universities fail?).  Christensen's work describes corporations (and industries) that are considered to be enormously well run and successful, but are essentially destroyed in a relatively short time by some new competitor that brings a new innovative approach to meeting the needs of the customers. The disruptor's new product is less expensive than the traditional product, and has some attributes that are quite different. Initially, the disruptor's product does not meet the customer's needs so well as the established product. Over time, however, the disruptor's product improves, and customers come to find its additional attributes to be very useful.  Christensen also differentiates between this disruptive innovation and a sustaining innovation. The latter is used to improve established products. Christensen shows that continual application of sustaining innovation often leads to an established product that is "better" than the customer needs -- or wants to pay for. Thus the very quality of the established product may well be one of its weaknesses. Eventually a tipping point arrives, and customers rapidly migrate to the new product that is both less expensive and has additional useful attributes.

Christensen describes characteristics of traditional companies that have fallen prey to a disruptive innovation. I always felt that higher education fits to a T his picture of an industry that has a high probability of suffering a major disruption.  Fortunately, you no longer have to view the issues through the lens of my interpretation of Christensen, because Christensen and co-workers have recently turned their attention higher education. A number of their works have now appeared or will soon appear. I previously did a post on his recent Disrupting College; Christensen and Eyering have a book appearing in August on the Innovative University:Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out; and Michael B. Horn, a regular Christensen collaborator, has recently published an excellent paper Beyond Good and Evil:Understanding the Role of For-Profits in Education through the Theories of Disruptive Innovation.  All highly recommended.

With all of this, I thought it useful to introduce a blogroll on some companies, institutions, think tanks, etc. that seem to me to be doing interesting things that might well turn out to be disruptive for various aspects higher education, and/or sustaining for others. The blogroll will not seek to be all-inclusive. Rather, it will be indicative of areas in which I find that very interesting things are happening. I will  add more sites to the roll from time to time as I see things that attract my interest.

Going Global

The British Council recently held its annual Going Global conference in Hong Kong, the first time it had held the conference outside of Britain. Inside Higher Ed has several interesting articles describing the conference (Global Comparisons, Evolving Higher Ed Hubs, How Asian are Asian Universities?).  

The Chronicle of Higher Education published an interesting interview with Martin Davidson, Chief Executive of the British Council, regarding the importance of holding the conference in Asia.  In that interview, Davidson made several related points that I think deserve emphasis and comment.

The real crisis in higher education?

I begin by noting three articles (from among many similar ones that have appeared) and a personal interaction that raise important questions for higher education:

California visual effects firms facing a bleak landscape

Foreign locales are luring away productions and work with tax credits and cheaper labor, causing once-successful companies to close.

This is the headline of an article in the LA Times describing the financial plight of many California visual effects firms.  Lower costs elsewhere, growth of worldwide pools of talent, and widespread availability of cutting edge technology are the villains. The jobs being lost are high paying, and involve very high levels of skill.

The technology represents the cutting edge of filmmaking, involving teams of digital artists trained in 3-D modeling, computer animation and computer graphics....

California-trained visual effects artists are still in demand, but often now have to travel overseas for work.

Limits on the globalization of the American model of higher education?

Clara Lovett, president emerita of Northern Arizona University, has recently published a very insightful Commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  The Commentary focuses on recent globalization experiences of American business schools, both successes and limitations.  The lessons she draws from these experiences are then extended to American higher education more generally.  

Lovett begins her story with the 1990's, when "The comparative advantage of American business schools as sources of well-prepared graduates turned into something resembling a global monopoly...".  At that time, American schools ramped up international recruiting to their home campuses, drawing students primarily from "elite, Westernized, Anglophone families", students who had academic backgrounds that matched well with those of  American students and the resources to pay high American tuitions.  Soon, responding to the international demand for American degrees,  American business schools began to branch out around the world in the most promising markets.

Although successful branches were opened in many world sites, difficulties began to appear, some arising on the home front.  It was, of course, impossible to replicate home-campus conditions in the new branches, and many faculty felt very uncomfortable about the resulting programs. Accrediting constraints added  another level difficulty.  Externally, international political events often made overseas operations more difficult.

Lovett's key point, however, is that something much more fundamental was at play:

In retrospect, however, it is clear that demography and culture, not politics, placed limits on the ability of American business schools to clone themselves successfully abroad, even when conditions were favorable and suitable local partners could be found. 

Even with the branch campuses in place, the children of the elite were still going to the US for their schooling. The new offshore campuses were attracting  primarily students from families in an emerging middle class - students for whom study in America would be a major financial burden. The offshore campuses also attracted young women for whom study abroad was considered to be culturally inappropriate.  This offshore group belonged to a very different demographic that was less well prepared than the group going to America in terms of traditional academic credentials, mastery of English, comfort with Western norms.  Of course, the American model of elite higher education, with its blending of research and teaching,  is the most expensive model of higher ed ever invented.  Pricing offshore programs at the high levels demanded by this model put these programs out of reach of most middle and lower income students.  Thus the realistically defined potential student body turned out to be less than predicted.

More damaging to the model was the unwelcome realization that not all of the world works just like America. Students, although they were hungry for access to many of the components of the world-famous American MBA, and the networks to which it provided entry, did not find it met all of their more actual, contextual needs.  Thus:

Graduate students in the United Arab Emirates, for instance, noted that to function in their region, they needed to apply principles of Islamic finance even while learning those of Western finance.

US faculty are, by and large, not in a position to speak knowledgeably about many of the problems of actually doing business in other countries and other cultures. Consequently,the door was left open for foreign institutions to "borrow" what they could from American higher ed, and then add country-and culture-specific material and pedagogies to provide a more powerful local product.   Thus, there is a proliferation of "other models" being developed, some of which already are being exported to countries with similar cultural conditions. 

Lovett finds that higher education leaders around the globe are quick to acknowledge the core strengths of the American approach, including peer evaluation and academic freedom. Nevertheless, those leaders see the key challenge of the century to be making higher education accessible to an ever increasing number of students, most of whom will be in countries where economic, social, and political conditions provide constraints that make the American model of limited applicability.

As a consequence, according to Lovett, in order for American higher ed to remain a major player on the international scene:

it means joining colleagues across the globe to develop alternatives to the academic models developed in Western Europe and the United States in the past couple of centuries.

In the light of the resistance to change that so characterizes American higher education, this will be a tough prescription to fill!  However, since the model is already breaking down in the United States, we may have our own internal impetus to move in the direction suggested by Lovett (see The business model for higher education I and II).

Readers might also be interested in looking at an article on a related topic that I recently published in the Times Higher Education entitled Don't assume one (US) size fits all.

Security in East Asia, and the soft-power role of higher education

As I struggle with imagining what globalization might mean for higher education, I have come to appreciate finding new sources that help me to increase my understanding of political and business trends around the world.  I was recently introduced to a very interesting journal that has been very useful in helping me to look at some of these issues from a distinctly non-US perspective.  The journal is Global Asia, a publication of the East Asia Foundation in Seoul, Korea.  In some ways, this is Foreign Affairs with an Asian perspective.  Its goal is:

to provide a compelling, serious, and responsible forum for distinguished thinkers, policymakers, political leaders and business people to debate the most important issues in Asia today

It seeks to represent no fixed point of view or agenda, and so contains articles representing a wide variety of primarily Asian viewpoints on a multitude of issues.   It is sometimes jarring but greatly informative to see the ways various events are perceived in different countries of Asia, and the often significant gap between those perceptions and the dominant American perceptions.

The most recent issue (Spring 2010) contains a number of very interesting articles, as well as a “Cover Story” of eight articles on the theme: Security in East Asia: The Pieces of a New Architecture.  Authors from China, Japan, Korea Singapore, and Russia provide viewpoints on this security issue that are strongly shaped by events, politics, and histories of their own countries. Two Americans add their thoughts on the role the US should be playing in this important development. 

The Cover Story focuses on new security architectures that might provide increased cooperation on economic and political issues that undergird regional security.  As such, most concentrate on what might be called “hard issues”.  Interestingly, only one of these eight articles even mentions a role for the “soft power” of higher education in helping to provide long term security and stability for East Asia.   In this “outlier” article, Cho Hyun, Deputy Minister for Multilateral and Global Affairs at the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, points out the importance of soft power in building security, particularly through the contribution to cooperation and mutual understanding that can come through increasing interactions of the peoples of the countries of the region.  One such interaction that he mentions occurs through higher education. Cho points out that in 2008: more than 200,000 students chose to study in countries outside their own within Northeast Asia rather than going to other countries (the US and Europe).

Of course, it is not at all unusual for people struggling with difficult and important questions of regional security to give short shrift to consideration of softer aspects such as higher education. However, it is the case that one of the goals implicit in the ongoing Bologna process has been to use higher education to help forge a shared identity in the region that in turn will bring increased security to a region that has known centuries of fierce internal conflict:

A Europe of Knowledge is now widely recognised as an irreplaceable factor for social and human growth and as an indispensable component to consolidate and enrich the European citizenship, capable of giving its citizens the necessary competencies to face the challenges of the new millennium, together with an awareness of shared values and belonging to a common social and cultural space.

In an earlier post (An Asian Bologna Process moves forward, Dec, 2008) I reported that the member states of ASEAN had begun to consider a Bologna –like process for higher education in that region for similar reasons. Indeed, the website for the ASEAN Education Members Meeting contains an opening statement that contains sentiments very close to those of the Bologna statement:

Education underpins ASEAN community building.  Education lies at the core of ASEAN’s development process, creating a knowledge-based society and contributing to the enhancement of ASEAN competitiveness. ASEAN also views education as the vehicle to raise ASEAN awareness, inspire the “we feeling”, and create a sense of belonging to the ASEAN Community and understanding of the richness of ASEAN’s history, languages, culture and common values.

The communiqué of January 28, 2010 describing the 5^th ASEAN Education Ministers Meeting indicates that they, indeed, are beginning to move along many paths similar to those being followed in Bologna, although details are sparse.

It will be interesting to continue to follow the ASEAN process, and see if it becomes successful enough that the next round of articles on regional security will see it as a factor worthy of mention. 

Big news on the Laureate front

Laureate International Universities just announced it has a new Honorary Chancellor – none other than William J Clinton, 42^nd President of the United States!  According to the press release:

 As Honorary Chancellor, President Clinton will advise this group of universities in areas such as social responsibility, youth leadership and increasing access to higher education.  He will also encourage civic engagement and youth leadership on important social issues during his appearances at university campuses and in print and online messages to the nearly 600,000 students in the Laureate network.

“Last year I had the opportunity to visit Laureate’s universities in Spain, Brazil and Peru to speak to students, faculty, and the communities that they serve,” said President Clinton. “These private universities exemplify the same principles of innovation and social responsibility in education that we worked to advance during my Presidency and now through my Foundation, and I am pleased to support their mission to expand access to higher education, particularly in the developing world.”

A little over a year ago, I wrote a post (Laureate keeps building a global brand) about Laureate’s building of a high-quality global brand.  In addition to focusing on ever-increasing educational quality in their system, they have long recognized the importance of working with groups such as the World Bank to increase access to education, and in participating at international higher education meetings.  The appointment of President Clinton as Honorary Chancellor will help greatly to increase their visibility and brand globally.

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 On another front, Laureate announced last week another acquisition in the US – the WASC accredited National Hispanic University in San Jose, CA. According to the press release:

With its focus on educating the growing and underserved Hispanic population in the United States, NHU complements Laureate International Universities' mission of providing broad access to higher education.

According to the Mercury News:

A new, nonprofit foundation made up of the current trustees will own the property and continue to run the college's charter high school on campus. Laureate will operate the university and pay unspecified rent to the foundation. In addition, the foundation will have three seats on a new NHU board set up by Laureate.

The Mercury News also reports that Laureate hopes to add up to 8000 online students within 5 years, and possibly open other campuses of NHU around the country.  Again, according to the Mercury News, Paula Singer, the President and CEO of the Laureate Higher Education Group:

said NHU offered Laureate an opportunity to tap into a large pool of Hispanic youths who can't afford traditional, campus-based education or don't have time because they work.

It will be interesting to see how Laureate succeeds in expanding educational opportunities to this group without running into the high student debt problems that many other for-profit, online programs have encountered. 

Don't assume one (US) size fits all

I published a short article on April 15 on the Times Higher Education website.  The article is entitled From where I sit: Don’t assume one (US) size fits all.  In it, I express some of my concerns about the widespread desire in developing countries to build new universities using US universities as models.  I find that the biggest challenge in consulting in such countries lies in convincing those in charge to focus on what they want and need from their new institution and how to make it happen, rather than on how to create a copy of a successful foreign institution that is optimized to solve a very different set of problems and issues.

I invite you to check it out, and weigh in with comment on either the THE site or here. It is an important issue.      

Global higher education funding and the great recession

I highly recommend a very interesting recent paper by John Aubrey Douglass of UC Berkeley, entitled Higher Education Budgets and the Global Recession: Tracking Varied National Responses and Their Consequences.  He looks at the impacts of the current recession on education funding and policy in a number of OECD and other countries, including the US.  His conclusion, as captured in his abstract, is rather disheartening, to say the least:

Preliminary indicators show that most nations have not thus far resorted to uncoordinated cutting of funding for higher education that we generally see in US state systems. Their political leaders see higher education as a key to short-term economic recovery, long-term competitiveness, and often their own political viability –particularly in nations with upcoming elections. Further, although this is speculative, it appears that many nations are using the economic downturn to actually accelerate reform policies, some intended to promote efficiencies, but most focused on improving the quality of their university sector and promoting innovation in their economies. One might postulate that the decisions made today and in reaction to the “Great Recession” by nations will likely speed up global shifts in the race to develop human capital, with the US probably losing some ground.

One of the special difficulties in the US, as Douglas sees it, relates to the fact that 75% of all post-secondary students here attend state-controlled public institutions:

In short, how state budgets go, so goes US higher education; whereas most national systems of higher education financing are tied to national budgets with the ability to borrow and leading to different policy responses – with most OECD nations delaying budget cuts to higher education or, in some instances, actually increasing their investment and enrollment rates.

 Although there is considerable focus in this paper on the US in general and California in particular, it presents very informative and useful snapshots of the impact of the recession on higher education in a number of countries around the globe.

While this report paints a very depressing picture, the OECD report Education at a Glance 2009 shows that 2006 tertiary educational expenditures per student in the US were the highest in the OECD, and a bit over twice the average for OECD countries.  Although it is increasingly clear that global higher education funding trends are not in our favor, it is equally clear that we will remain for some period the leader in expenditures per student. Thus, we have the resources to continue to be highly competitive - if we use our resources more efficiently and effectively.  As noted by Douglas, many of our competitor nations are using this downturn to accelerate needed educational reform.   We should do the same, instead of demanding more resources to support the status quo (see the previous post, The canary in the higher education coal mine).

 

 

Further developments in the Columbia University Global Impact project.

A year ago, I wrote briefly about Columbia University’s announcement of the opening of a number of global research centers (Columbia goes global following a different track, Mar 20, 2009).  These centers were to be multi-use: facilitating international research collaborations, academic programming, study abroad, etc. As stated in the original announcement:

The goal is to establish a network of regional centers in international capitals to collaboratively address complex global challenges by bringing together scholars, students, public officials, private enterprise, and innovators from a broad range of fields.

This was, and is, a very unusual, and very strategic approach to globalization, seemingly going far beyond the efforts of other universities.  It states that the core missions of the research university of teaching and research should be tied together synergistically as globalization occurs.  It also states that these centers should be used to pull global expertise into the Columbia network of research and teaching, thus leveraging Columbia’s already very significant strengths.  And, of course, the emphasis on complex global challenges is what is most likely to bring those global experts to the centers, thus increasing Columbia’s visibility and prestige.    

Now, a year and 2 days later, Columbia announced the opening of two additional centers, one in Mumbai, India, the other in Paris, France.  These join the original two centers, located in Beijing and Amman.  The role of the centers was further articulated in this most recent announcement as:

Columbia Global Centers are established to encourage new collaboration across traditional academic disciplines at the University. Some of the research and scholarly initiatives will be regionally focused; others will involve multiple centers, and in some instances the full complement of centers will be engaged across many continents. The centers are also intended to support a significant expansion of opportunities for Columbia students and faculty to do work abroad, with the flexibility to pursue long- or short-term research and service-learning projects.

In my original post, I called this A fascinating - and overdue - experiment! It is good to see that the experiment is continuing, and remains fascinating. 

The business model for higher education: II. How might it be fixed?

In the previous post,The business model for higher education: I. What doesn't work? , I described some of the approaches used by a fictional corporation, VPI, to create ongoing financial health, and looked at higher education’s use of similar approaches. The mainstay of higher education’s search for financial health thus far has been to increase price faster than CPI, while the use of other common corporate strategies has been quite limited.  This post uses the corporate model to suggest several approaches that might be useful in redefining the business model for higher education. In fact, many of  the things higher education might chose to do if it could not raise tuitions faster than CPI are things that already have been done at  many institutions at a relatively low level, or have been discussed widely.  For them to become a major component of the activities of higher education institutions, however, would require major changes in perspective and view of mission. 

OECD Feasibility Study for the International Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO)

The OECD Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) is a ground-breaking initiative to assess learning outcomes on an international scale by creating measures that would be valid for all cultures and languages. Between ten and thirty-thousand higher education students in over ten different countries will take part in a feasibility study to determine the bounds of this ambitious project, with an eye to the possible creation of a full-scale AHELO upon its completion.

 The OECD has just announced a project with the grand title that I took for this post, that has the potential to change much of the ongoing discussion in the US regarding assessment of learning outcomes (see, e.g. Learning outcomes information and the quality of higher education).  The OECD is initiating a very interesting pilot project to see if it is possible to create measures of learning outcomes valid across countries and cultures.  (A very useful earlier OECD report on learning outcomes can be found here.)

The OECD expresses concerns that the current ranking systems used in higher education almost ignore what should be the key point of such a ranking: the quality of the education that the students receive.

 Rankings tend to give research, award-winning faculty, and older, pre-1920’s universities priority over teaching and learning.

As a consequence:

Current ranking systems threaten the diversity of higher education. Universities are under pressure to cut programmes and redefine missions in a fight for survival that depends on clambering into the top 10, 50 or 100 universities. They may throw their best assets overboard in the rash attempt to keep their university afloat. Such pressure breeds an unhealthy copycat behavior among HEIs, the result of which can only be a bland standardization.

This project, then, has as a major goal the development of instruments that individual institutions can use to measure their own effectiveness in the area of student learning. Change within universities can then be driven by the goal of producing greater student learning, rather than by the goal of making it into the upper echelons of an ultimately meaningless ranking.  

The project actually has 4 strands that will ultimately be used to look at student learning.  They are:

1.    Generic – Analytic skills, critical thinking, written communication, etc

2.    Discipline specific – looking at the “above content” part of learning: the capacity to use what has been learned, often in novel situations

3.    Context – learning takes place in the context of the individual institution, which involves physical and organizational characteristics; education-related behaviors and practices; psyco-social and cultural aspects; and behavioral and attitudinal outcomes.

4.    Value added- given the characteristics of the incoming students at a particular institution, what intellectual advances occur over the course of the degree?

For the first of these, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, appropriately modified for use across cultures, will be used to show proof of concept.  For the second, two fields, economics and engineering, will be used to see if meaningful instruments can be developed. According to Inside Higher Education, the Australian Council for Educational Research will lead a consortium working on this aspect. For the third, existing data, such as persistence and graduation rates, surveys of student expectations, quality of student-faculty interactions, self-reported learning gains, will be gathered and analyzed. Ultimately, surveys of alumni and employers will join this mix. The fourth strand will not actually be included in this pilot project since the time required to create the instruments will exceed the period of the pilot. Instead, this will be a time of reflection on the types of methodologies that might be used in a larger project

Although the OECD document does not make it clear, Inside Higher Education reports that the US is participating in this study in two ways: providing some financial support and some students in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Missouri, and Pennsylvania will be part of the test cohort for the Generic strand.  This is in stark contrast with the situation two years ago, when the Bush administration declined to participate in an earlier stage of this project.  Thus it appears that the interest in outcomes assessment that was so prominent in the Bush administration has not disappeared with the coming of the Obama administration, as many in higher education had hoped.

 

Higher Ed.'s societal obligations in a globalizing economy

The American Association and Colleges and Universities (AACU) just released a survey of employers that looks at the characteristics employers want to see in the graduates they hire, and a related paper from the AACU Board called The Quality Imperative.   The survey (which does not in any way contradict others that I have seen previously) reports that only one in four employers feel that higher education is doing a good job in preparing students for success in the global economy.  Not surprisingly, employers would like to have graduates who have both in-depth and broad range knowledge and skills   Highest on their wish-lists for learning outcomes are several intellectual skills, e.g. critical thinking, that, as emphasized by Derek Bok in Our Underachieving Colleges, we don’t teach very well.  The learning outcomes that 70% or more of the employers felt should get increased emphasis from higher ed are:

The ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing            (89%)

Critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills                            (81%)

The ability to apply knowledge and skills to real-world settings through

 internships or other hands-on experiences                                  (79%)

The ability to analyze and solve complex problems                         (75%)

The ability to connect choices and actions to ethical decisions    ( 75%)      

Teamwork skills and the ability to collaborate with others in diverse group settings     (71%)

The ability to innovate and be creative                           (70%)

Concepts and new developments in science and technology             ( 70%)

The Quality Imperative jumps off from this survey and the recent national emphasis on access, to make the very pertinent opening point:

The current focus on college-going, while important, short-circuits the core issue of educational quality. Yet both employers and educators know that the quality shortfall is just as urgent as the attain­ment shortfall.

What needs to happen in education can be described in a nutshell as:

To prosper in today’s knowledge economy, in sum, all Americans will need a contemporary blend of liberal and applied learning.

To describe what this might mean, the AACU paper makes a number of recommendations of needed change, focusing on a very useful set of “Essential learning outcomes” to help meet the challenges.  In addition they make a recommendation that I consider to be of paramount importance:

Ensure that all fields of study help students achieve demonstrable competence in the essential learning outcomes, including the ability to apply their learning to new settings and unscripted problems.

In other word, we actually need to measure what we are doing, so that we – and everyone else - can see if we are being successful in doing what we say we are doing.   It will be interesting to see what the AACU does, other than publish these two pieces, to encourage its members to step up to the plate on these vital issues.

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Reading these two reports made me think of a lovely article by Michael Hiltzik that appeared in the business section of the Dec. 31, 2009 LA Times.

Hiltzik’s article was occasioned by the centenary of the birth of Peter Drucker, one of the most interesting business thinkers of recent times. Drucker considered the role of the corporation in society, not just as a creator of wealth, but as a partner in achieving the goals of society.  Quoting Hlitzik, quoting Drucker:

The business enterprise is a creature of a society and an economy, and society or economy can put any business out of existence overnight… The enterprise exists on sufferance and exists only as long as the society and the economy believe that it does a necessary, useful, and productive job.

And quoting Hiltzik again

He also warned that an enterprise that fails to “think through its impacts and its responsibilities” exposes itself to justified attack from social forces…. He held that the purpose of a business is to serve the customer by providing a good or service useful in both personal and social terms.

Thus, a corporation that focuses solely on the chase of profits, to the exclusion of satisfying its social role, will not over time be successful.  And, in doing so, it may stimulate reactive political measures that ultimately will be good neither for the corporation, nor for society.  Sound like what is happening today?

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So what possible rational relationship could exist between these two items? Possibly none, but let me give it a shot.

Essentially everyone in higher education would say – and brag- that we provide a social good.  We are, however, also quite fond of telling society that we know what it needs better than it does –society will think short term, we think long term, ergo, etc.  And we then say that we already are doing what needs to be done quite effectively, and that everyone should just trust us.  

The report described above actually shows an area in which society – or at least employers – wants the same thing as the academy. Eighty one percent of employers want us to do more to teach critical thinking and analytic reasoning skills.  By comparison, according to Bok:” With all the controversy over the college curriculum, it is impressive to find faculty members agreeing almost unanimously that teaching students to think critically is the principal aim of undergraduate education.”   However, even with this pretty complete overlap of goals, it turns out, according to the results quoted by Bok, that we actually do a terrible job in teaching these critical skills. Bok argues that our failure results from our unwillingness to acknowledge and face the changes in our learning approaches that would be required in order to improve critical thinking amongst our students.  So our support of this societal goal actually is rhetorical rather than real.

If one goes down the lists of learning outcomes given by the AACU, one finds numerous areas where many would argue that “we already do that, and well.”  In general, however, there is little actual data to show how well we achieve the desired learning outcomes. Where data exists, more often than not they seriously call into question the effectiveness of our approaches.

I imagine that if Drucker were to look at this situation, he would warn us that unless we can demonstrate that we are in fact doing things that society needs as we move into globalization, we risk suffering some of those political and financial outcomes that he had envisaged only for aberrant corporations.  So we should pay very close attention to the AACU's call for "demonstrable competence" in areas that will be essential for the future health of our society.

Two market-state visions of the future of higher education

 Joseph Aoun, the president of Northeastern University, recently published a very insightful article entitled Two different leaders, two different visions in the Huffington Post.   His two leaders are Nicholas Sarkozy, the president of France, and Luke Ravenstahl, the mayor of Pittsburgh.  Their visions allow us to consider how education may be viewed in different versions of the developing market-state as described by Philip Bobbitt (Welcome to the market state, Feb 2006).

Sarkozy recently announced that he wants to invest more than $29B in France’s universities and research, with a clear rationale and goal:

France is giving herself unprecedented resources in order to have world’s best universities because with the world’s best universities we are preparing ourselves to win the competitiveness battle.

Ravenstahl, on the other hand, announced that he wants to tax college and university tuitions. His rationale and goal are also clear:

It’s time for everybody to pay their fair share, especially if we are to complete our financial recovery. We can no longer afford to provide city services to those who are not paying their fair share.

The money is needed to help cover $15 million in higher pension costs, plus contribute $1 million to Carnegie Libraries to keep neighborhood branches from closing.

As Aoun points out, these two leaders provide a very different conception of the role of higher education in the world.  Both fit the view of the Bobbitt’s market state, which I have discussed often before, but with very different perspectives. Sarkozy believes that higher education is a critical resource to be used by the state in its global economic battles, and so serves as a public good requiring state support.  Ravenstahl’s proposal reflects a belief that higher education is a private good which should be expected to pay its way, and not depend on special breaks from the state. The role of the market is clear in both proposals, and neither is proposing to treat higher education in the traditional nation state role as being worthy of state support because it provides a general, unspecified public good such as producing better citizens. 

Bobbitt suggested that each market state will be some combination of three possible forms: (1) a mercantile state-i.e. one that endeavors to improve its relative position vis-à-vis all other states by competitive means, or (2) and entrepreneurial state, one that attempts to improve its absolute position while mitigating the competitive values of the market through cooperative means, or (3) a managerial market-state, one that tries to  maximize its position both absolutely and relatively by regional, formal means (trading blocks, etc.).   As I point out below, the Sarkozy approach is consistent with some of the characteristics Bobbitt describes for the managerial state, while that of Ravenstahl fits characteristics of the entrepreneurial state.

*****

Sarkozy consistently has made reform of research and higher education a key element of his government’s programs.   For whatever value rankings have, the 2009 ARWU rankings of world universities shows 11 top 100 institutions in Great Britain, 5 in Germany, and only 3 in France – a result that cannot find favor in the Elysee Palace!  An article in the Economist described the situation in French higher education in the following way:

There are no tuition fees, nor is selection of students on entry allowed, apart from the required baccalauréat. Lecture halls are swamped; first-year medical students camp out early for scarce places. Campus libraries close at weekends. As many as 52% of undergraduates fail after their first year; and 90,000 students quit university each year without a degree. France's brightest students compete for places at the elite, fee-paying universities, known as the grandes écoles, instead. And the best researchers snap up well-financed jobs abroad.

Even softening this statement a bit by taking into account the usual British/French competitive spirit, one can imagine why Sarkozy has made higher education reform a high priority. 

A major goal of the proposed reforms has been to make changes that will lead to improved economic results for France.  To that end, many of the reforms seek to bring about closer links between universities and business. That view, plus some reforms that potentially might lead to inequalities between institutions and students, have resulted in massive opposition from faculty, students, and administration. This opposition led to a 4 month higher education strike by those groups last spring.  Most of the participants seem to actively decry some aspect of the current system, but nevertheless are dead set against change. 

Reactions by these groups to Sarkozy’s recent promise of increased investment (in them) have been decidedly mixed. In part, this is because one goal of his proposal flies in the face of egalite:

create around ten campuses where we excel, with the resources, critical size and links with industry allowing them to rival the world’s best universities.

Thus, Sarkozy must not only find the financial resources to improve the system, but must face major political obstacles to bring about needed organizational change.  It is not easy to build a robust world-class educational system, even when you start with all of the strengths of the present French system! Nevertheless, this top-down approach to educational reform in support of competitive economic position reflects well what Bobbitt described as:

an omnicompetent government characteristic of managerial market states.

*****

On the other hand, Pittsburgh already is in the enviable position of having 2 universities in that ARWU top 100 ranking (U. of Pittsburg and Carnegie Mellon). Almost as good as all of France! Taxing the tuitions of those and other higher education institutions will not destroy them, of course.  It will make it harder for them to maintain – and increase - the levels of excellence that they currently have.  So why would the city take that approach to filling in a hole in an underfunded pension fund? There are certainly local conditions that explain part of it, such as Pittsburgh’s declining population and serious, multi-year budget problems.

But Pittsburgh is going to need its higher education complex to be even more robust if the city is to find increased traction in an increasingly complex world.  Wikipedia (recently - changes often of course) described Pittsburgh’s economy as “largely based on healthcare, education, technology, robotics, and financial services.”  With the possible exception of financial services, those areas sound like the core strengths of Pitt and Carnegie-Mellon.  It is hard to imagine that these areas would have become the drivers of the Pittsburgh economy in the absence of those two universities – and it is highly unlikely that these areas of the economy will be able to increase in vitality if Pitt and Carnegie-Mellon are not thriving themselves. Pittsburgh already has what France is striving to create – a thriving, creative higher education system. That system will be very hard to rebuild if it is damaged to solve an unrelated problem.

Nevertheless, in the emerging market state, higher education must expect that it will be required to supplement its current indirect role in the economic health of its region and its nation with a more explicitly direct role. Paying taxes might be one such direct role, but is unlikely to be the most effective, for reasons stated above. Fortunately, in late December, Mayor Ravenstahl announced that he was dropping plans for the tax in order to pursue an undefined partnership of the city with higher education and the business community that will address the financial health of the city.  This type of collaborative partnership, if pursued actively and effectively, could become one model for the type of direct market-state role that best fits the strengths of higher education. That is a much better way to use American higher education to help balance budgets than taxing their resources!

Bobbitt described the entrepreneurial state as being characterized by, among others, decentralization, economic evaluation of all policy, and encouragement of the locality as laboratory.  In a laboratory, of course, some experiments will be badly designed, and this looks like one of them.  The economic evaluation was short sighted and would most likely have led to larger future deficits for the city.  On the other hand, the experiment still will be a success if some new and more effective coupling of higher education to government and business emerges. Certainly this local experiment would not have been tolerated in the more centralized managerial state – a tuition tax would be national, nor not at all. But it will probably be through such local clashes that models of effective partnerships that serve the demands of the market state will be developed.  

*****

Aoun steps back from the focus on these two leaders to look at the wider scale of the world, and finds much of the rest of the world on one side, and the US on the other.  As noted before in these posts, many other countries (think much of Europe and Asia) have articulated policies outlining the role of higher education in their economies, and even in their foreign policies.  As a consequence, they are creating strategies to strengthen their systems of higher education so that they can play their desired roles.  The US, on the other hand, seems to assume that its higher education system will always be globally pre-eminent and that the enormous role it has played in both the economic vigor of the US, and the shaping the external perception of the US will continue unabated without attention.  At the same time, there are ample signals that the pre-eminence of American higher education is rapidly eroding.  Some of this erosion is to be expected – higher education is a growth area around the world as living standards increase.  However, other aspects of the erosion can be attributed to the fact that we as a nation are simply not paying attention to the long term. 

Bobbitt warns of a danger associated with an entrepreneurial state:

The entrepreneurial state may become so intoxicated with its own absolute position that it fails to prepare itself – by not deferring consumption in order to invest in infrastructure – for relative challenges from states whose competitive drive is masked by the improved wealth positions of all major players.

Sounds like a fair warning in this case!

 

Learning outcomes information and the quality of higher education

But the biggest problem with American higher education isn=t that too many students can=t afford to enroll. It=s that too many of the students who do enroll aren=t learning very much and aren=t earning degrees. For the average student, college isn=t nearly as good a deal as colleges would have us believe.  Kevin Carey

 

 Kevin Carey, one of the most articulate critics of American higher education, has a powerful new article entitled A That Old College Lie@  in the Winter 2010 issue of Democracy.  (Some of my previous posts about Carey=s work are: Sept.1, 2006; Oct.11, 2006; April 13, 2009).  Richard Vedderer also has an excellent recent post talking about Carey=s article.

Carey begins by writing about Pell grants, and the plans of the Obama administration to increase them. He points out that Pell grants have become less important over time as college costs have increased much more rapidly than CPI.  As a consequence, student borrowing is increasing, as are loan default rates.  With this, he segues into his main theme, which is given by the quote that begins this post.  He argues that students at all levels of colleges and universities are not learning all that they could be, and that Aquality@ of American higher education is not what we imagine or claim it to be.  He rightly points out that what we (and much of the world)  think of as the Ahigh quality@ of the American system is Adriven by the top 10 percent of institutions and the students who attend themBHarvard, Stanford, MIT, and the like.@ 

Carey argues, however, that we actually know very little about how good our institutions are at helping their students to learn.  Publicly available data on that subject is almost nonexistent.  As a consequence, Aquality@ is actually primarily Aprestige@, and prestige is defined through combinations of Awealth, admissions selectivity, price, and a generalized sense of fame that is highly influenced by who=s been around the longest and who produces the most research.@  Learning is just simply left out of the mix that defines quality in higher education.   However, if comparable information on teaching and learning were readily available, a number of problems would be addressed.  For example, this information would enable newer institutions to compete more effectively with the old guard, thus increasing competition and leading to greater cost controls. A resulting customer focus on teaching and learning would lead colleges to allocate their more of their resources to that end, rather than, e.g. high priced professors who don=t teach.   

Carey point out that some groups have recently begun to collect information on learning outcomes that would greatly aid parents and students in making informed choices when picking a college - and would help us to give a new and important redefinition of quality.   However, he argues that this information in being held captive by the colleges themselves, and by educational lobbies that represent the colleges.  One has only to review some of the submissions made by such organizations as ACE and AAU against the outcomes focus of the Spellings report to see the merit in Carey=s argument. 

Finally, Carey tells us what needs to be done:

The Obama Administration has proposed huge new increases in Pell Grants and other higher education programs, amounting to more than $70 billion over the next decade. It should require institutions receiving these funds to provide more information to the public in exchange. It should invest in R&D to develop new methods of gauging student success. And it should be prepared to fight a scorched‑earth political battle against the entrenched special interests that will, if history is any guide, surely rise in opposition.

None of these points will surprise readers of this blog.  However, Carey says it all very well, and covers a lot of important points I have not mentioned in this post.  The one issue he did not cover that I think is missing is the Bologna process, which focuses on learning outcomes in higher education (see The Bologna Process- a significant step in the modularization of higher education Sept 12, 2008).  The Bologna process now involves 46 European nations, and dozens of institutions in South America.  Our refusal to seriously consider learning outcomes risks leaving us outside the next big global movement in higher education. This could result in the US losing its leadership role higher education, and becoming a follower with lots of catch-up to do.  

Carey=s solution is one that the Obama administration really should consider- this is an unusual opportunity to move American higher education to a more effective plane, increasing our ability to cope with the changes going on in the wider world. 

Higher education as an urban/national/global services industry

I strongly believe that any post in a higher-ed blog that prominently displays a picture of a bottle of good New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc has a high probability of being worth reading. A recent post in GlobalHigherEducation adds considerable support to that theory.  Kris Olds and Susan Robertson, the co-editors of said blog have reprinted a contribution that they wrote for the UK Higher Education International Unit’s most recent newsletter.  The subject is an increasing emphasis on the international aspect of higher education as an economic engine of national economy.  The reason for the photo of the NZ Sauvignon Blanc being prominently displayed in that article is that a recent report in GlobalHigherEducation shows that trans-national higher education brings more money into New Zealand annually than do international sales of their (justly) vaunted wines.  Olds and Robertson also point to reports from other countries showing similar high economic impact of the globalization of their higher education systems.

Update on the College of Santa Fe -Laureate deal

I recently described some of the financial difficulties of the College of Santa Fe, and attempts by the city and the state of New Mexico to save the College (New on the for-profit higher education front, May 14, 2009).  I reported that Laureate Education was part of the efforts, and that the College of Santa Fe was likely to soon join the Laureate family of institutions of higher education. 

The Santa Fe New Mexican reported today that the pieces have fallen into place.  Laureate will lease the institution, with a purchase option. Laureate has agreed to commit $20M to offset losses, and to offer discounts to local and in-state students. Governor Bill Richardson has committed $11M of state money to help make the deal possible. The College of Santa Fe name will be kept, "while also giving Laureate the flexibility to add other words." The global Laureate University Network continues to grow!

A missing skill in the globalization of higher education

Inside Higher Education had an excellent article last week entitled Outsourcing Teaching, Overseas that captures many of the problems faced by higher education institutions as they struggle with globalization:

How to teach university degree programs offered overseas is a complicated question. Does a university rely on faculty from the home campus to travel abroad for a year, semester or month at a time to teach, hire a new cadre of faculty at the overseas location, deliver coursework through distance education, or some combination thereof?

 The article describes one approach used by the Utah State University John Huntsman School of Business to offer a Utah State bachelors degree in economics in China.  This program is described in the annual report of the School in the following way:

Utah State University has been offering degree programs through cooperative agreements with partner universities in China since 2000. Currently, the programs are offered at Northeast Dianli University (NEDU) in Jilin City, Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) in Beijing and Institute of Advanced Learning (IAL) in Hong Kong.....

Students in the degree program in mainland China (at NEDU and BIT) pass the rigorous Chinese national college entrance exam, which identifies the top 6% of high school graduates. Once admitted to our partner universities, the students apply for admission to Utah State University and are admitted if they meet our admission standards. The students become matriculated USU students upon successfully passing our intensive English language courses offered by IELI (Intensive English Language Institute)....

In our model, various USU departments agree to provide the specific courses required in the degree program, including general education courses. Departments assign “lead professors” to write the course syllabus, pick the text book and other instructional materials, and to write exams and other assignments for the course. The teaching materials are provided to “local facilitators” (faculty at our partner institutions) who have been approved by the USU department to deliver the lectures and other course material on-site in China and Hong Kong. Lead professors and local facilitators are in contact each week to make sure that the courses are on-track and to deal with teaching and evaluation issues. Final grades are assigned by the lead professor.....

It is anticipated that we will continue to admit 100 students each year into our programs at NEDU and BIT. In our program in Hong Kong, at IAL, we anticipate an increase in enrollments to 150 each year. Hence, we believe that we will have as many as 800 students in our degree program in Asia in the near future (accounting for students who drop out or transfer to Logan). This number is likely to exceed 1,000 once the Hangzhou program is approved. It is likely that we will graduate more than 300 economics majors each year at these locations.

On the “factual” side, these quotes tell us that the program is offered in several sites, and is attracting a pretty significant number of students.  The students are high quality, having passed the Chinese national college entrance exam plus intensive English language tests. The annual report emphasizes that the student body is so small at present because the Chinese government limits enrollment. So it sounds like this is a successful program from the student’s perspective.

The concerns discussed in the Inside Higher Ed article relate to the 3rd quoted paragraph above, describing how the courses are taught.  Phillip Altbach's comments in the Inside Higher Ed article certainly express the concerns of many:

My view, and I am in a small minority on these matters I think, is that foreign degrees should be taught by faculty from the sponsoring university faculty, and not be random local scholars, even if they are ‘approved’ by the home campus faculty. What USU is really doing is ‘franchising’ their degree -- in a McDonald's way -- which is common especially among low prestige British universities in countries like Malaysia these days. Those British institutions have in some cases gotten themselves into hot water with the British quality assurance agencies and the press for low standards, inadequate supervision and the like. USU may well get into that bind.

This captures, I believe, the cultural and philosophical conundrum that a university must resolve as it seeks to globalize.  At one level, it would be nice to have faculty from the sponsoring university teach courses all around the world, as suggested by Altbach.  Unfortunately, that is highly unlikely to happen - past experience clearly tell us that faculty generally do not want to be posted to some other part of the world for extended periods.  Once is fun, twice is a problem, and three times is impossible.  Even regular short stays are often difficult to make work.  I know of one top  university with two offshore sites where courses are taught in a way that only requires their faculty to be there for two weeks at a time, once each year.  After several years of running this program, the only way to get regular  faculty to commit to this offshore teaching is to make two weeks at one site, two weeks at the other the entire teaching load for the year! This is not the way to solve our budgetary problems!

Various thought provokers

There are too many interesting higher education tidbits floating around recently  for me to write a full post on each, so today I will just briefly comment on several fairly recent reports that struck me as interesting.

I found the recent Inside Higher Ed article entitled Australians Open U.S. Med School to be quite fascinating.  The University of  Queensland School of Medicine and the Ochsner Health System of Louisiana have opened the University of Queensland School of Medicine Clinical School at Ochsner .   This new center will enable a clinical program that involves two years of medical school in Brisbane followed by 2 years of clinical training at Queensland”s outpost at Ochsner.  Only American students will be accepted. Graduates will get an Australian medical degree from Queensland.  The UQ School of Medicine bills itself as “Australia’s Global Medical School”, and David Wilkenson, head of the School of Medicine, describes this new joint venture as “a new model for preparing doctors to work anywhere in the world.” A very interesting way for a foreign university to enter the US market- and an interesting take on globalization of higher education!

Continuing with Inside Higher Ed, I really liked the even more recent Views article by Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman, Bucking Conventional Wisdom on College Costs. They quite persuasively argue against eight nuggets of conventional wisdom:

Conventional wisdom #1: Spending increases in higher education are inevitable, because there is no way to improve the productivity of teaching and learning without sacrificing quality
Conventional wisdom #2: More money means more quality, and quality means higher performance.
Conventional wisdom #3: Among public institutions, state governments are now minority shareholders in higher education, and as a result public policy goals should take a backseat to market rules to steer institutions.
Conventional wisdom #4: Colleges and universities cannot be expected to invest in change or to pursue state priorities without new money. A corollary is that any reductions in funds must be replaced before funds can be considered as “new.
Conventional wisdom #5: Instructional costs rise by the level of the student taught – e.g., lower-division students are cheaper than upper-division students, graduate students are more expensive than undergraduates, and doctoral students who have been advanced to candidacy are the most expensive of all.
Conventional wisdom #6: Institutions can make up for lost public subsidies by increasing research revenue.
Conventional wisdom #7: An expansive undergraduate curriculum is a symbol of quality, and necessary to attract students.
Conventional wisdom #8: States can improve postsecondary productivity if they direct more students to community colleges

Readers of this blog will recognize that I have written often about many of these points, but Jones and Wellman do a great job of concisely making their point that these are, indeed, false "truths".

Nicholas Allen has a very nice short article entitled The Future of Non-Traditional Higher Education in the United States: A Perspective: Part 1 of 2 on the website of InsideTrack. In the interest of full disclosure, I am on the advisory board of InsideTrack. Allen writes:

Major shifts are taking place that may reshape the higher education industry
as never before, creating both opportunities and challenges for most educational institutions, and for the nation. 

He groups the forces bringing about this change into five categories, and talks about the first two, national needs and critical demographic shifts, in this article. Each of these two points to greatly increasing numbers of non-traditional students, a group that our traditional institutions have not served well in the past. His points generally are not new, but he brings many threads together in a very informative, insightful way.  I look forward to Part 2.

And finally- a ranking of institutions that I can understand and appreciate! Readers of my blog know that I am not fond of rankings of institutions of higher education.  However, Jane Marshall writing in University World News informed me of the 3rd annual (how did I miss the first two?) Professional Ranking of World Universities put out by the French Grande Ecole MINES ParisTech.  This straightforward review takes the CEO's of Fortune Magazine's Global 500 and identifies their degree institutions. Points are then assigned to the degree institutions: 1 point if the CEO had only one degree; 1/2 point to each institution if the CEO had 2 degrees.  The points are added up, and viola!- a new ranking that included 377 institutions of higher education, with Tokyo, Harvard and Stanford at the top.  Now, in many ways, this is as crazy as any other ranking.  For example, there are many sociological reasons why there may be correlations between CEO's and their universities that have little to do with the actual quality of the academic programs.  But it has some benefits.  First, other rankings generally come from a closed academic world - they rank on the basis of various forms of recognition by other academics. This one ranks based on value judgments made by a world outside of academe - a world that ultimately supports academe and thus should be noted.  Second, it is a contemporaneous judgment - that is, it is based on who is succeeding in this world at this moment.  Most other rankings are much more backward weighted (Nobel Prizes from 1920!) and so encourage the ossification of the field. Perhaps the most interesting result for me is not the top "winners", which are all pretty predictable, but the very long tail of the distribution.  Most CEO's don't come from the winners, but from a variety of institutions large and small. It suggests to me that if one's goal is to become the CEO of a Fortune Global 500, one may want to question whether or not it is worth paying for one of the "winners".

How the Recession of 2009 Will Affect Post-Secondary Education - viewed from Canada

I thank James Pringle at Ryerson University in Toronto for calling my attention to a report from the Educational Policy Institute with the challenging title On the Brink:How the Recession of 2009 Will Affect Post-Secondary Education. The report was written by Alex Usher and Ryan Dunn .  The report focuses on post-secondary education in Canada, but many of its insights and conclusions apply to higher education more broadly.

The authors look at impacts of the recession, first on endowments, followed somewhat later by decreasing state revenues and corresponding decreasing support of post-secondary education. They discuss increasing tuition to meet some shortfalls, and the differences between Canada and the US in terms of options in this arena.  They discuss a number of institutional response options to revenue shortfalls, none of which will surprise most of my readers.

I particularly liked the discussion of what the authors dub the “Peak Post-Secondary” Scenario.  They note that around 2014 the main cohort of baby-boomers begins to retire, and at that point, costs of health and elder care begin to rise rapidly, and the percentage of workers begins to decline, thus permanently exacerbating pressure on state budgets.  Consequently, just as the recession recedes, societal priorities are likely to be pushed away from education by demographic pressure .  Thus the “Peak Post-Secondary” Scenario calls for permanently declining per-student revenues. 

In almost any scenario, the authors suggest that Institutions will need to increase revenues from non-traditional sources.  In the “Peak Post-Secondary” scenario this becomes urgent. Among the new sources, the authors recommend cross border education, but not just any cross border education:

But cross-border education is not solely about picking up bodies overseas and shipping them here; that might have been an adequate description of the game twenty years ago, but things have moved on since then. The establishment of a broad middle class in many developing countries has vastly increased the demand for post-secondary education. In particular, demand has boomed for education branded (if not provided) by large, established, Western universities is very strong in much of the world. Large public universities from North America, England and the UK have a good name in Asia and Africa – much better in many cases than the local university. The growth market in education for major Western universities lies not in attracting ever-greater numbers of students but rather in modularizing knowledge, delivering it in locally-appropriate forms through international educational partnerships, and certifying students at the end of a course or period of studies.

Sounds like a description you might have read in some of my previous posts!

However, the authors point out that revenue generation is unlikely to be sufficient to resolve the financial problems of post secondary education in the future: Institutions are also going to need to tackle their cost base. At this point, the authors begin to struggle with the challenges of fixing our near-universally broken cost/price model.  They suggest one possible change that is quite logical- and sure to be greatly controversial:

One might reasonably expect, therefore, that Peak Post-Secondary will lead to a reengineering of tasks and costs, and in particular the creation of a two-tier faculty. This will see some faculty paid to concentrate more on research and teaching graduate students, while others will be paid primarily to teach – and in some cases teach an increasingly standardized curriculum.

They suggest that this common curricula, which they view as being at the undergraduate level only,  could have both financial and educational benefits:

By adopting common curricula, many hours of instructor time could be saved – time which could be used to increase student/instructor contact and assist students in developing mastery over freely-available subject matter courses.

Obviously a break from our image of thousands of post-secondary institutions each offering its own special hand-crafted education.  However, it might well offer some educational benefits in that it focuses more on the issue of learning rather than curriculum development.

The report ends with a very important call to reality that sums things up in a way that I heartedly endorse:

Only those institutions and governments that re-think the delivery of education itself, by measuring inputs and outputs and deciding based on evidence where dollars can best be spent, can hope to come out of this recession in better shape than they came in.

What Moody’s doesn’t say in its recent report on higher education

 Moody’s Investor Service recently put out a report entitled Global Recession and Universities: Funding Strains to Keep Up with Rising Demand. It provides a very interesting and informative view of some aspects of the higher education scene as observed from outside of the system. The report came to my attention through posts in GlobalHigherEd (on whose server the report above resides) and University World News, and I thank both for their nice articles.

Moody has looked at universities at selected areas around the world, and how they are handling the global downturn.  Moody’s ultimate interest, of course, is to be able to rate these universities as they access capital markets, so the focus is on aspects of the environment that can or will impact their financial stability.  I will describe some of their observations that I find most interesting, and then will talk about the part of the report that I find most important - the things that are not said.  I will not try to describe the whole report, but recommend that you simply read the original - it is only 13 pages long. I also will focus on the parts of the report that refer to US universities, since that is the group that I know the best.

As a minor point, the report emphasizes public institutions, stating that public universities “most likely accounting for between 80-90% of all students enrolled in tertiary education.” A recent OECD report claims that private higher education now accounts for 30% of tertiary enrollment globally.  This relatively minor discrepancy does not invalidate any of the conclusions of the report, of course. 

Moody’s notes that recessions generally lead to enrollment increases for a variety of reasons, but warn these increases may not be uniformly distributed:

While enrolment declines are possible at individual institutions due to particular market, reputation, and management challenges, we expect higher education overall to enjoy a significant “tail-wind” in student demand for spaces over time. This is especially likely for universities that are “access” oriented with less restrictive academic requirements and a mission focused onskill development. Many prominent universities that function as comprehensive research institutions focused on maintaining strong academic quality reputations and high entrance standards may see the greatest impact in their advanced degree programs.

On the other hand, Moody makes a strong point regarding fundamental changes in funding:

Moody’s believes that the magnitude of economic changes in some countries may place pressure on historic funding and financing patterns of higher education. This would likely be driven by two conflicting trends– increased policy directives to expand university programs and more limited ability of governments to fund the desired expansion Not surprisingly, many countries now face significant budgetary challenges with large competing demands on government dollars.

While some aspects of spending on higher education have been temporarily boosted through stimulus spending, this is largely financed by government deficits and may be difficult to sustain beyond the near term. At the same time, the desire for rapidly rising investment in higher education to support higher participation rates and expanded research capacity suggests the need for significant new operating and capital dollars over an extended period. These trends may well become clearer as the ability to fund higher education comes under greater pressure.

In  regard to this desire for greater revenues, in the understatement of the year, Moody’s cautions: raising student fees is usually a politically sensitive decision.

For the US, there is a timely warning regarding globalization:

In general, we also believe the level of global competition and pooling of talent for faculty and students will continue to increase. As U.S. universities cut back significantly on hiring and capital spending,  non-U.S. faculty and students may be susceptible to recruitment to
other leading universities or home countries. Over the past three decades, the number of students enrolled outside their country of citizenship has risen dramatically, from 0.6 million worldwide in 1975 to 2.9 million in 2006, a more than four-fold increase. Developments like the Bologna Process in the European Union, and similar efforts in other regions, may further encourage the trend of crossing borders to enroll in higher education.

Overall, Moody’s is looking at financial stability impacts of increasing student demand (good), research funding (good), uncertainty of state funding (bad), conflicting demands for services (mixed), political pressures(bad).  So what is missing?  Actually, it is not so much that something is missing, but that the financial problems and dangers become clearer if one looks at them from a slightly different angle, one that will be familiar to readers of this blog.

UNESCO's World Conference on Higher Education

It became clear to us that we are indeed in the middle of an almost unprecedented revolution in higher education -- not just small changes around the edges, but fundamental changes. And our job in the trend report -- and I think in this conference as well -- is to try to understand and then deal with, in constructive ways, the nature of this revolution. It’s different, ladies and gentlemen, from what’s gone on before.

Phil Altbach, quoted in Inside Higher Education

UNESCO is hosting a second World Conference on Higher Education this week, the first having taken place a decade ago in 1998.  A pre-conference press release by UNESCO summed up very well some of the issues facing higher education today.  Among the issues raised in that release are:
•    the number of tertiary students worldwide grew by 50% from 2000 to 2007
•    globally, the number of university aged people who enrolled in higher education increased from 19% in 2000 to 26% in 2007, but enormous geographic differences in participation exist. Women now are a small majority of enrolled students worldwide.
•    higher education is increasingly seen as an engine of economic development, but governments worldwide are overwhelmed with the costs associated with widening access
•    as a consequence, public institutions worldwide increasingly are required to find non-governmental sources of funds to cover some portion of their costs.  This has led to increasing fees, and a variety of entrepreneurial activities that sometimes risk to conflict with mission.
•    private higher education has increased rapidly around the globe, often in response to inability of the public system to meet increasing demand. Private higher education now accounts for 30% of global enrollment.  
•    globalization has produced an explosion of institutions and programs that act across national borders. Countries are becoming international education hubs, regions are developing common educational standards and brand.  Distance learning via the internet in increasingly popular.
•    as a consequence of these changes, improving quality assurance and methods to compare institutions and degrees from different countries become critically important.  The focus of these efforts has become outcomes of student learning and skills rather than traditional measures of input.

There is a nice report of the early part of the Conference in Inside Higher Education, and University World News is providing continuing coverage, as well as a number of articles focusing of specific aspects of the Conference.   A communique will be published at the end of the conference.  A draft of that communique is already available, but will be modified based on events.

Two more, very different, meetings

My friend Joe Duffey keeps sending me announcements about meetings in some vain hope that he can keep me more aware of what is happening in the world.  I feel compelled to comment on two of his recent alerts because they do say a lot about what is going on. One depresses me, the other I find very hopeful.
1. The World Summit on University Ranking- this is the depressing one. 
Readers of this blog know how I feel about university rankings: I dislike them greatly.  I could spend a day listing all of the reasons why, but will just run over a few. First, the idea that the overall quality of universities can be reduced to a single number in silly.  Every great university has some really terrible programs, and many otherwise mediocre institutions have some superb programs.  When trying to rank programs (as the NRC does), one finds that the reputational data are squishy (who really knows very much about the programs at more than a hand full of rival institutions?), and the “harder” data are rather arbitrarily chosen (it can be easily measured).  In the end, the statistical uncertainties of the data leave almost everyone in a statistical tie, but that doesn’t stop anyone from dropping the uncertainties and using the numbers as absolute. 

Because research data are easier to obtain than teaching data, rankings focus on the research.   This effective devaluing of teaching and learning in our self analyses is not healthy, and at some point will lead to difficulties in our relations with the societies that support us.

Whatever data are used, some person then must decide how to weight different inputs in order to add it up to a definition of  the best university.  Obviously, however, there is absolutely no unique way to combine the data.  One way is arguably as good as another.  This does not stop anyone either.  In fact,  the rankers like this aspect, since it means that an almost endless number of rankings can be published, each leading to a happy financial or reputational ending for someone.

Rankings are, of course, a celebration of the status quo.  Consequently, they punish institutions that are trying to respond innovatively to the changing world.   This would be of little importance if so many governing boards and presidents were not focused on “improving their rankings”.  Thus badly needed innovation - including cost cutting innovation - becomes even more difficult to carry out.

Finally, when making “world” rankings, most often the criteria are based on venerable Western universities.  Why? Why should looking like Harvard be a good idea in many countries of the world?

So overall, I think we can all be quite concerned that we now have an International Rankings Expert Group.  They are producing a product that by definition is flawed, and serves almost no good purpose.

2.The Global Higher Education Forum 2009-  this is the hopeful one.
This is almost the anti-meeting to the one described above;

The Global Higher Education Forum (GHEF) brings together scholars, policy makers, researchers, academics and administrators to reflect, analyse, discuss and debate on a wide variety of issues pertaining to global higher education in a south-south context. In particular, GHEF2009 will focus on the theme of Global Higher Education, seeking to ponder and reflect on the benefits and challenges and at the same time, envision the way forward for emerging and expanding, rather than for established, higher education systems.

This is a group that actually wants to think about alternative approaches to those which are celebrated above- approaches that may be enormously more valuable for the countries involved. As pointed out in the Background and Rational of the meeting:

In view of the many similar initiatives by different regions and groups to promote the development of higher education through a common platform (which is increasingly biased towards European/American models), the deliberation on the practicality and appropriateness of Asian, Latin American and African countries following the same pathway is timely. The current global economic meltdown presents another interesting backdrop and context to analyse and deliberate on the suitability of European/American models for expanding and emerging higher education systems in Asia, Latin America and Africa.

There is a wonderful article in GlobalHigherEducation written by two members of the organizing committee, Morshidi Sirat and Ooi Poh Ling, describing the goals of this forum. We should all wish them success.

Bologna finally comes to the US

Thanks to the Lumina Foundation, an exciting educational experiment is underway. InsideHigherEd reports that Lumina is leading a US project that applies the  “Tuning” approach of the Bologna process to  several different undergraduate majors.   Numerous higher education institutions of differing size and mission in Utah, Indiana, and Minnesota are participating. 

The Bologna process, overall, tries to bring some consistency to the meaning of degrees around the Bologna region in order to facilitate movement of students around the region, and acceptance of degrees by employers (see The Bologna process - a significant step in the modularization of higher education, Sept 12, 2008). At the same time, the process does not seek to challenge the differences in approach and viewpoint that characterize the various member states. Thus, there is agreement on the intellectual capacities that should describe someone who has attained a degree of a certain level, but no limitations on the approach that got the student to that point.   Clifford Adelman has just published another detailed and very insightful report on the process,  The Bologna Process for U.S. Eyes: Re-learning Higher Education in the Age of Convergence. Highly recommended.

The Tuning approach is the discipline specific part of this process. The approach seeks to create guidelines that faculty can use as they develop statements of expectations for such things as learning outcomes and  levels of learning for individual disciplinary degrees.  The process involves surveys of graduates, employers, and academics to get a clear picture of the learning outcomes that should be expected of specific disciplinary degree programs in the 21st century.  The process has moved along well in Europe, and has led to the formation of a Latin American Tuning Process that now involves institutions in about 18 Latin American countries.  High time the US joined the world and experimented with the approach! 

It is disappointing, but no surprise, that InsiderHigherEd reports that Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, is concerned that all of this could provide a threat “academic freedom”.  This is the usual argument advanced to derail attempts to define desired learning outcomes or to measure them. However, at one level, Nelson is certainly correct.  If faculty do not participate fully and creatively in helping to develop appropriate and meaningful statements of desired learning outcomes, someone else will eventually impose standards - and those externally  imposed standards quite possibly will provide a threat to academic freedom. 

Economic value of international students: Australia

An important issue when thinking of national policies toward globalization of higher education is, quite simply, whether such globalization can provide a positive impact on the economy.  For example, NAFSA estimates that in 2007-2008, international students contributed $15.54B to the US economy. There are, however, many countries that have more actively reached out to international students than has the US.  How have their efforts translated into economic benefits?

Kris Olds at  GlobalHigherEd.com has several posts that look into different aspects of that question.  A recent post looks at recent data on the economic impact on Australia of international students.  The data comes from a report entitled The Australian Education Sector and the Economic Contribution of International Students.  The report shows that the economic impact of international students is very significant, making education the third largest export category earner for Australia.  Olds provides an overview and brief analysis of the data, and discusses the origins of the report itself. 

I have only skimmed the report, but it appears that the economic impact analysis looks only at international students coming to Australia.  The economic impact of the international students being taught at offshore sites of Australian universities is not considered, although this is clearly important for a number of Australian universities.  I also found Table 5-7, which looks at the number of international students who were granted visas to stay in Australia after study to be very interesting. 

The globalization of American higher education: approaching the tipping point

I was honored recently to be invited by the Regents Professors Group at Oklahoma State University to give a talk on globalization of higher education.  The title of this post was the title of that talk.    I had a great visit, and learned a lot about some very exciting things going on at OSU.  I thank Ramesh Sharda, Chair of the Group, for inviting me, and John Mowen, past Chair of the Group, for taking such good care of me on my visit. 

The presentation was videotaped by the Regents Professors Group, and can be found here.

Supply chains, revisited

In my musings on possible ways in which higher education might globalize, I have often referred to the modularization process that has been at the core of much of the globalization of industry. A key component of this process has been to turn from vertical integration of companies to a focus on core competencies with an evolved supply chain.   A recent article on Economist.com entitled Moving on up: Is the recession heralding a return to Henry Ford’s model? looks at how these supply chains have held up during the current economic downturn. Turns out many of these supply chains have had a lot of troubles as partners were unable to cope with the economic problems and went out of business.  This is leading some to yearn for the good old days of vertical integration.  The article reminds us of multiple reasons why vertical integration is not well suited for today’s world, but wisely rules nothing out in today’s unsettled conditions.

Most interestingly, the article points out that there is a “third way” to approach this problem:

A company can gain some of the benefits of vertical integration without full ownership. Consider Toyota, a motor company that has been a byword for decent management in a way that General Motors has not been. Toyota rigorously screens its suppliers for quality and financial health, and then spends time and money to ensure their efficiency and survival, sometimes taking minority stakes.In the 1980s, when Toyota chose Johnson Controls to supply seats, it blocked the supplier from expanding its facility, fearing that the additional cost would harm Johnson's profits and effectiveness. Instead, Toyota’s engineers worked with Johnson to streamline production, rearrange the factory floor, and cut inventories, ultimately showing that expansion wasn’t needed after all.

This approach creates:

a supply chain with the stability and efficiency of vertical integration but with some of the flexibility of looser networks of suppliers. The approach is also far cheaper than the traditional vertical method of owning suppliers outright, a virtue at a time when cash and credit are rare.

I will need to reflect a bit in order to see how this information might fit into my thoughts about the future of globalization of higher education. At a minimum, however, It provides a reminder that, in searching for optimal modularization, it is important to look at possible reasons that some of the partners might fail to perform.  Working with them in advance to strengthen their weak points may be in everyone's interest.