Changing Higher Education

Free college tuition is a lovely, but dangerous idea

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

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

The high cost of funded research in colleges and universities

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

 

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

A business model view of changing times in higher education

 

As my regular readers know, I have written several posts that utilize a business model approach to look at one aspect or another of higher education. Last year, readers suggested that I combine several of these posts in an article that would combine multiple threads - ideally in a coherent fashion! The resulting article has found a good response among policy and institutional leaders, and so I thought that some of my other readers might also find it interesting. I have pasted it in below. For those who would prefer it in PDF, they can Download Business model view of change. Curiously, the original document contains Endnotes that were stripped out by Typepad, but they are not crucial to the arguments. 

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Changing times in higher education viewed through the prism of the business model

Lloyd Armstrong

Summary: The environment for higher education in the United States is changing rapidly. The effects of this changing environment will not be the same at all institutions, however. This article uses a business model approach to look at some of these environmental changes from a perspective that gives leaders tools to better understand how various changes might impact their own institutions, and how they might best respond.

 

Reputation and brand in the changing world of higher education

The world of higher education has obviously entered into a period of many changes. Major universities have jumped into the MOOC game, classrooms have been flipped, competency based learning is going mainstream, government at all levels is demanding measurable outcomes, traditional tuition increases that outpace inflation are coming under attack, non-traditional students have become the new tradition, and the continuing tight financial environment for higher education is forcing many institutions to reexamine their organization and mission. Under such conditions, it is interesting to consider the bases for reputation and brand in higher education, and ask how the changes we are seeing might impact the brand and reputation of different types of institutions. What follows are my first tentative steps to address this issue.

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.

What will The College of 2020 look like?

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future

Niels Bohr

(Note: the following was first published as an invited contribution on The College of 2020 in parts 1 and 2. I reproduce it here for the benefit of my readers by permission of the editors of the College of 2020)

What will the College of 2020 look like? It probably will be similar in at least one way to the College of 2011 -there isn't any one archetypical College of 2011 and there won't be any one archetypical College of 2020 either. US higher education consists of about 4,500 accredited colleges of 2011 with an incredible diversity of sizes, approaches, missions, and resources. I would expect the same to be generally true in 2020, with some important caveats: I think there will be significantly fewer accredited colleges in 2020, and the mix of sizes, approaches, missions, and resources will be quite different from today.

These changes will be driven by two forces that push from different directions, but each leading to increasing fiscal constraints on higher education. On the one side, local and national governments are finding it increasingly difficult to support higher education at traditional levels. There a world-wide movement towards decreasing the role of government in providing social goods, and the US reflects that movement. In addition, other governmental costs such as health care, prisons, and retirements are growing rapidly and squeezing out areas such as education. On the other side, all of higher education utilizes a model whose costs over the last 30 years have steadily grown about 3% a year above CPI increase. In the tuition-dependent private sector, tuition has grown apace, i.e. roughly CPI plus 3% every year for the past three decades. The costs of higher education are reaching a point where government, parents, and students are beginning to question if the product is worth the price. The answer is increasingly "no" for private institutions that have lower brand value, but the "no" likely will move upstream in the value ladder over time as costs increase until only a relatively small number of high brand value private institutions are immune. On the public side, the answer is increasingly, "no, not given our fiscal constraints" no matter what the brand value of the institution.

Data mining higher education records in search of improved outcomes

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has just funded a potentially very interesting and useful study at WCET. Unfortunately, I have to go through a few explanatory layers of acronyms in order to explain that sentence, but stick with me. WCET stands for the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies, while WICHE stands for The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. WICHE was created to facilitate sharing of resources among the higher education systems of the West, and has 15 member states.  

The grant focuses on identifying variables that impact student retention and progression.  The study itself will involve data mining of student records from an interesting mixture of instituions: American Public University System, Colorado Community College System, Rio Salado College, University of Hawaii System, University of Illinois Springfield, and University of Phoenix.  The aggregate data to be analyzed contains records of over 400,000 students:

Each of these postsecondary entities has performed extensive research on their own datasets.  The combination of large data sets across a wide variety of types of institutions (public/private, two-year/four-year, traditional/non-traditional) will seek to find patterns identifiable only through analyzing large data sets representing a widely diverse set of students.

The canary in the higher education coal mine

Over the past few months, we have seen an increasing flood of articles by supporters of public higher education around the nation sounding alarms about the potential negative consequences of planned cuts in higher education funding.  Heads of public systems provide detailed analyses of the economic importance of their institutions, and of their role in creating social opportunity and mobility.

What seems to be lost in this discussion is that almost everyone in positions of legislative or executive authority appreciates these arguments and believes they are correct.  The choir is being preached to. The problem, simply stated, is that there are no additional funds that can be allocated to higher education in these times of enormously constrained state budgets.   Even when the economy recovers, as it eventually will, history suggests that funding for higher education will not return to previous levels.  Higher education is simply one of a large number of areas of state funding whose growth exceeds state revenue growth.

The reality is that American higher education generally  costs more than society can sustain into the future.  This is true in both the public and private sectors, which have research and education functions that are organized very similarly even though the funding sources may differ. The “canaries in the educational coal mine” , the early warning system, are, in fact, the tuitions of the private sector of higher education.  Those tuitions have grown for over 30 years at a rate that significantly exceeded the growth in either CPI or family income.  It should have been obvious to all that a system that demanded such growth in order to operate would, in the end, crash into a cost barrier.  Although the immediate crisis is in the public sector, the problem is serious in both sectors.

What are needed at this point are not more calls for a larger piece of the public pie for higher education.  The present economic situation makes it highly unlikely that those calls will be answered in a meaningful way.  What is really needed is a hard look at our present model of higher education.  Accepted beliefs underlying the model need to be challenged and rethought. Mission and the societal role of higher education should be reevaluated for the 21^st century.  Faculty roles, organization of research and its relationship to learning throughout the postsecondary experience need to be reexamined.  Administration, which captures an increasing fraction of higher education’s budgets, deserves equal scrutiny.

It is time to recognize that a redefinition of the model of American higher education is necessary.  It is foolish to argue that we already have the best of all possible models – any model can be improved. Nor should we be fooled by the esteem which our model attracts around the world – indeed, it was the dominant model of the last half of the 20^th century, but the 21^st century looks different in any number of ways.  Real educational and research leadership in the 21^st century will require a model that responds directly to the changing realities of the times

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. 

Creativity and the Research University:II

This is a continuation of Creativity and the Research University
II. The creative faculty

The issues are different here from those encountered in looking at student creativity, because we are dealing with a class of accomplished scholars who have already shown capacity for creativity.  Thus the environment in which the faculty work becomes a critical determinant of whether or not they can reach their creative potential.

Amabile describes some of the environmental conditions that help to promote creativity.  Among them are:

• stability of employment - this lowers attention to problems not related to the main tasks of research and teaching
• low bureaucracy - similarly, this enables faculty to keep their attention on the important things
• encourage rational intellectual risk taking, accept failure
• encourage interdisciplinary conversations - this help connections into different networks of knowledge
• expectations high but reasonable
• rewards not controlling - faculty choice in tasks, methods

In many ways, we see that the university is set up relatively well to meet most of these conditions. Tenure, for example, provides the desired stability of employment - for those who have it. Faculty are given broad choice by the university in how they will carry out their tasks.  However, even here there are reality constraints that can lessen creativity. For example, funding for the research component of the employment is increasingly difficult to obtain, and faculty generally find themselves devoting larger fractions of their effort to finding needed research funds. The funding, when found, often is narrowly defined and can squeeze out any significant creative flights of fancy. Worst of all, many universities push their faculty to have the largest possible grants at all times - it helps the rankings. Such controlling pressure probably does not lead to the highest creativity.  As Amabile has pointed out, the external funding can be most useful if it comes after the “aha” moment of creativity, since at that point it is not controlling, but facilitating.  Thus some relatively small internal funds to support research through the necessary first idea steps ultimately could lead to increased creativity of proposals.

In addition, other improvements need to be made in the existing university structure.  Bureaucracy, unfortunately, has grown significantly in universities over the years due to both internal and external pressures. Universities tend to have very intrenched administrative systems and groups, and in many institutions strong leadership will be required to create the kinds of administrative restructuring needed to create organizations that more closely meet tomorrow’s needs. For example, on many campuses I hear very vocal complaints about inefficiencies in the research offices, which seem not well organized to meet new requirements of the Federal Government, alert faculty to new research opportunities, provide timely grant financial data, etc.  Internally, the important principle of shared governance has often led to a profusion of sometimes overlapping faculty committees that both demand considerable time on the part of the participants, and lead to frustration on the part of other faculty who feel that their ideas and innovations are being subjected to unfair or confused scrutiny. 

Finally, many of our leaders do not do as good a job as they should of creating a supportive atmosphere of high expectations in their institutions.  Distinguished senior faculty are the most important players in creating this atmosphere of supportive expectations.  For example, I.I Rabi was a Nobel-prizewinning physicist at Columbia, one of the founders of modern quantum mechanics.  He was legendary in his ability to stimulate his colleagues to “try harder”. One of his colleagues was quoted in Rabi’s obituary as saying “The most spectacular thing about Rabi was that during a 15 year period there were four Nobel Prizes all in different fields of physics at Columbia.  Although Rabi wasn’t involved in the specific work, he was the key motivating person.” According to a widely quoted (and perhaps apocryphal) story, Rabi would roam the halls of the department, dropping into offices to ask about the latest research of individual faculty. When it had been explained to him, he would ask, “ Is this the most important problem in your field? If not, why aren’t you working on the most important problem?” With more senior faculty helping to define expectations like that, we would have a much more creative atmosphere!

One of the areas where universities generally are not really good is in encouraging interdisciplinary conversations.  Many claim to do it well, but when you look at it closely, few are actually good at it.  It is interesting to look at the brand new King Abdulla University of Science and Technology (see my comments here and here), which is organized with the goal of actually being at the forefront of  interdisciplinary knowledge creation: 

KAUST is a modern research university unlike any other.  The University is designed to allow physical and human networks – operating largely without regard for organizational or national boundaries – to flourish, thereby creating a critical vehicle for the exchange of ideas and the development of new knowledge.

The KAUST approach is obviously not the only one for increasing interdisciplinary activities and conversations.  However, it does give some feeling for the elements to be considered, and the significant organizational changes that might be required to maximize interdisciplinary exchange of ideas.

Are we approaching a tipping point in the globalization of higher education?

The unsettling financial events of the past few weeks have undoubtedly pushed the cost/price model of American higher education much closer to the breaking point.  In an earlier post, I argued that any significant limitations on price increases could cause fundamental problems for our basic business model.  We now are in a much more complex situation than I discussed in the earlier posts. The state of the economy certainly will lead to greater pressure from parents and government to halt increases in the real price of higher education, so we can expect more intrusive legislative actions, and much stronger push-back from parents.  Loans to parents and students, which have provided the undergirding support of our large price increases, will not be so easy to get in the future for a multitude of reasons including large drops in home values.   In addition, we face a situation in which philanthropy will be quite uncertain for some period, and endowments and their returns have been greatly battered.   For public institutions, there is the reality that states are seeing greatly reduced tax returns, and furious budget cutting is evident everywhere.   And on the cost side, the cost of borrowing (when it can be obtained) will certainly go up significantly. This will impact higher education directly in many ways, as in  our facilities programs where we usually use considerable long term debt.  In addition, many  higher education institutions have significant short term debt that is used to pay bills in between the huge inflows of income that occur at the beginning of each semester (trimester or quarter).

In my view, all of this pushes American higher education much closer to a globalization tipping-point, similar to the one  that occurred in Great Britain and Australia a decade ago.  In both cases, governments told public higher ed institutions that state funding would not be sufficient in the future to maintain their growth and quality, and that other sources of funding would have to be found - without passing the burden to domestic students.  The solution was to bring international students in at high tuition, and to open campuses and programs around the world.

Update on KAUST

The King Abdulla University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is moving along on its development plans (see King Abdulla University of Science and Technology - a paradigm for the 21st century? June 5, 2007).  In January, KAUST got off to an excellent start with the appointment of Shih Choon Fong as its first President.  Dr Shih is currently the very highly regarded President of the National University of Singapore, and will assume the presidency of KAUST next December.

KAUST is not waiting for its president to arrive, however, before implementing its plans to build by creating partnerships with the leading educational institutions in the world.  Although some of the agreements took some time to actually finalize, previously announced partnerships and dates are:
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institutite (June 15, 2007)
Institute Francais de Petrole ( June 22, 2007)
National University of Singapore (June 27, 2007)
IIT Bombay (July 16, 2007)
American University in Cairo (September 5, 2007)
Technische Universitat Munchen (January 24, 2008).
Each of these agreements describes partnerships in specific areas of research and education, with financial arrangements that vary to meet the circumstances.

In the last two days, three very significant new partnership arrangement with American universities have been announced.  On March 4, agreements with the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) and Stanford University were announced, and on March 5, an agreement with the University of Texas at Austin was announced.  It is reported that Stanford and UCB will each receive almost $30M over 5 years as part of this partnership.  Of that, $10 will be for participating departments, $10M will be for joint research at the institutions involving new KAUST faculty, $5M will be for joint research at KAUST, and $3M-$4M will be for administrative costs.  Stanford and UCB will each have responsibilities in identifying and helping to recruit faculty for KAUST, and in hosting KAUST faculty until the KAUST campus opens.  The conditions at UT are more or less the same.

All in all, a very impressive list of partner institutions.  The quality and the international visibility of each of them helps to assure that KAUST will indeed begin to develop following international norms for access and freedom of inquiry.

British Universities in China: the Reality Beyond the Rhetoric

This is the title of a very interesting recent multi-authored discussion paper of Agora, a British think-tank for higher education. Although the paper is about British universities in China, most of what is said carries over directly to everyone’s globalization efforts worldwide. The director of Agora, Anna Fazackerley, provides a thought provoking introduction that provides an excellent context for the rest of the contributions. She points out the importance to institutions of thinking strategically about their globalization efforts, and having a clear understanding of what they hope to gain from them. She also emphasizes that the Chinese are in complete control of the process in their country, and that it is therefore critical to understand what China itself really wants when it allows foreign universities to enter. As part of the answer to this question, she suggests that "It is becoming apparent that one of the main uses of British universities to China will be their expertise in science and engineering".

The paper contains six contributions from individuals have considerable experience with higher education partnerships in China and throughout Asia.  Their comments are all well thought out, and quite thought provoking.  They point out the positives and negatives of working with China, and describe some of the sources of difficulties. The paper concludes with 3 case studies of different models of UK-China higher education partnerships. One of these is about the Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (Interesting activity at the for-profit/non-profit interface: Laureate, Jan. 14, 2008).  The other two are the University of Nottingham’s Ningbo campus,  and the joint degree program between Queen Mary College, University of London and Beijing University of Posts and Technology. 

All this makes for very interesting and valuable reading.

The breakdown of the price-productivity-cost model of private research universities

I have learned a lot recently  participating in a project on Global Higher Education led by Paul Jansen and Debby Bielak of McKinsey &Co.  The project is sponsored by the Forum for the Future of Higher Education. Paul and Debby have collected a group of university CFO’s, a college president, and an old provost (me) together to apply a McKinsey sector-wide analysis to higher education. It is fascinating to see what such an analysis tells us about our world.

The team recently made a presentation entitled Higher Education Trends and Risks: Implications for Leading Institutions and Sector Performance  at the annual Aspen Symposium of the Forum.  My assignment was to talk about trends and risks for private research universities - in 15 minutes.  I approached this impossible task by first apologizing to the audience for the egregious simplifications that I would have to make in order to describe the situation in 15 minutes, and then introduced my simple one-parameter model to describe the problems facing the research university.  Since this model met with some approval at the Symposium, I thought it might be worth repeating here.

I began by describing what I called our Mission Box. Excellence - as defined by us in a very self-referential way - has become the visible driver of our mission.  Our mission, in a very general way, focuses on traditional undergraduate education, graduate and professional education, and research.  Focusing on excellence means that if it is worth doing (i.e. one of our mission foci), it is worth doing better.  Doing it better costs more money, so at some point the customer can’t, or won’t pay for it, so we lose money.  As a consequence, over time, losing money has become our very visible surrogate for excellence (my one parameter model). (Clayton Christensen, who also spoke at the symposium, has pointed out the often catastrophic outcomes of making your product better than the customer wants or needs. See also Disruptive Technologies:when great universities fail? March 3, 2006)

Changing US output in science and technology

The NSF just released two interesting reports. Changing US Output of Scientific Articles:1988-2003 is a detailed analysis of publications in refereed journals over that time period.  The companion publication, Changing Research and Publication Environment in American Research Universities, is based on interviews with scientists in 9 leading US research universities.

The first report extends and quantifies the well known result that the American share of international research publications has been dropping over time as other countries build their scientific and engineering capabilities.  More importantly, it also shows the very surprising result that the absolute number of US scientific publications in peer reviewed journals has plateaued or dropped since the early 1990s. The second report seeks to understand that flattening  of US research output.

Outsourcing research

InnoCentive has an intriguing business model.  As described on their website:
"InnoCentive® is an exciting web-based community matching top scientists to relevant R&D challenges facing leading companies from around the globe. We provide a powerful online forum enabling major companies to reward scientific innovation through financial incentives."
If your company cannot solve an important technical problem, you register as a seeker; if you are a scientist, engineer, etc  with a bit of free time and an itch to solve some interesting problems, you register as a solver. InnoCentive gets the seekers and solvers together, with financial prizes from the seekers to the solver or solvers who produce the useful solutions.  The Rockefeller Foundation has recently partnered with InnoCentive to apply the same platform to global development problems.  In this case, the seekers will be non-profit entities chosen by the Foundation that serve poor or vulnerable peoples.

One might be tempted to think that this “dating service” approach to problem solving could be useful only to small start-ups that cannot afford their own research.  Turns out, if you think that, you are really wrong.  A recent Harvard Business School working paper by K.R. Lakhani, L.B.Jeppesen, P.A.Lohse and J.A.Panetta has analyzed InnoCentive results for 166 scientific problems that the research laboratories of “large and well-known R&D-intensive firms had been unsuccessful in solving internally.” Several of the problems reflected several years of unsuccessful effort in the company’s research labs.  The results are fascinating.

The UC Berkeley Energy Biosciences Institute - a link in the knowledge supply chain?

There has been a lot of conversation and concern over the proposed Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley.  The UC description of EBI puts it directly into Pasteur’s quadrant of research that is both fundamental and applied to problems of importance to society:   

The Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI)  is a new research and development organization that will bring advanced knowledge in biology, physical sciences, engineering, and environmental and social sciences to bear on problems related to global energy production, particularly the development of next-generation, carbon-neutral transportation fuels.

However, the controversy stems not so much from the nature of the research, but the partnership behind the project, which involves an unusually close university-corporate relationship:

EBI represents a collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and BP, which will support the Institute with a 10-year $500 million grant. EBI's multidisciplinary teams will collectively explore total-system approaches to problems that include the sustainable production of cellulosic biofuels, enhanced biological carbon sequestration, bioprocessing of fossil fuels and biologically-enhanced petroleum recovery.

EBI will educate a new generation of students in all areas of bioenergy, and will serve as a model for large-scale academic-industry collaborations. By partnering with a major energy company, EBI will facilitate and accelerate the translation of basic science and engineering research to improved products and processes for meeting the world's energy needs in the 21st century.

This relationship will involve both the presence of 50 or so resident BP scientists on the campuses of UC and the University of Illinois, and a shared governance (and funding) process involving both BP and the academic institutions.  Details are still being worked out, but faculty, understandably and appropriately, have raised numerous issues relating to commercial influence on research and academic freedom, and the impact of this new entity on university internal issues of shared governance.

From my perspective, this partnership is another step for Berkeley towards a leadership role in what I earlier described (What business are we in? March 1, 2006) as management of the knowledge supply chain. In that earlier post, I suggested that one of the roles for universities in the future could be to both create new knowledge, and to see that that knowledge moves swiftly and effectively to the end users.  This would involve new types of close partnerships -process networks (see What has offshoring got to do with research universities? Feb.22, 2006) - between knowledge producers and users working towards a common goal.  Such partnerships need not be either exclusive or permanent, but would focus on an area where the partnership could bring mutual benefit. Of course, many partnerships already exist between academe and industry, but this EBI arrangement, through its scale and aspirations (including creation of the new discipline of Energy Biosciences), would seem to move to the next plane.

Modularity in university higher education: Research

(Continuing the discussion begun in Modularity in university higher education, June 16, 2006)

Research is, of course, what defines the reputation of most university faculty.  In turn, the reputation of the faculty builds the reputation of the university.   Thus the connecting input characteristics of the research module must be defined in a way that it supports the efforts of the faculty in this domain.  In addition, there are very close ties between research and Ph.D. education, and so one of the outputs that one would have to maintain for a research module is that it be appropriate for graduate training and, increasingly, undergraduate research experiences. However, in many if not most of our major research universities, there are research centers- often quite large - whose primary mission is not training, but production of focused sponsored research for, typically, government, sometimes industry.  Indeed, at one limit, many such centers do classified research, which is inappropriate for the training of students.   Much of the research in these centers generally is not carried out by regular faculty, but by a staff of professional researchers.  Thus, even in some cases when the research itself may  be quite appropriate for graduate training, lack of involved faculty mentors may give these centers marginal value for graduate training. The rational for having such centers will vary from university to university, but for those centers most removed from the academic center, the rational is often tied up in the larger service role of the university.  Such centers can contribute significantly to the reputation of the university, thus bringing value in a different dimension. 

Thus we see within a typical large university at least two different types of research module.  One of these is closely aligned with aspirations of regular faculty and with graduate training, and therefore has rather well defined input and output characteristics that allow it to work synergistically with other modules (e.g. education) in the university.  The other is more divorced from the educational component of the university, and tied in perhaps with the service component. Its output requirements are primarily that it satisfy its funding sources, input requirement that it do so in a way that enhances the reputation of the university e.g. through service, or perceived excellence.  Of course, the reality is that there is a continuum of possibilities that lies between these two types of modules.  However, these two extreme cases will let us investigate how the opportunities of globalization might lead to improvements in both.

And the leader in R&D is...

As described in my Feb. 17, 2006 post, the World in 2020, a recent report of the National Intelligence Council suggested that only 14 years from now, the engine of the world economy might have shifted from the US to China and other countries in Asia, and that leadership in science and technology might have moved from the US to the same Asian countries.   In a May 16, 2006 post entitled Where is the engine of the world economy?, I called attention to a recent LA Times article that seems to show that China is moving along a path that would enable it to achieve the economic status predicted by the NIC.  The recently released 2006 Science and Education Indicators from the National Science Board would seem to indicate that China is also on track to realizing the NIC predictions in the science and technology area.

Excess Intellectual Capacity

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

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

Competitive Higher Education

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

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

What business are we in?

A key question for every corporation over the recent decades of turbulence in the national and international marketplace has been "What business are we in?" As conditions changed, those corporations that really understood their business were best able to emerge in a strengthened situation. Often, companies decided that their existing understanding of their businesses were too restrictive. An oft-cited example of such a case is UPS, which realized its business was not simply delivering packages in its familiar brown trucks, but rather provision of logistics processes to a diverse spectrum of customers.  They are supply chain managers for companies of all sizes worldwide, working intimately with companies to design every aspect of their supply-chain.  In doing so, UPS moved from being a simple shipper of goods on request for corporations, to being a partner with corporations in the production and sales (and repairs) of their products. This partnership enables the corporations to better focus on their core businesses, and has enabled UPS to flourish. (A nice description of the UPS role in the changing world is given by Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat, p 141-150.)

Universities have tended not to ask what business we are in. Or perhaps the answer seemed to be too obvious - " what we are doing now is our business." As we look to the future of universities, however, this obvious answer simply will not enable us to imagine a broad enough spectrum of possible futures. As conditions change, what opportunities should we embrace, which should we ignore? What components of what we do today are to be strengthened, and which might be phased out?

This will be my first take this important question, and is intended to begin exploration of various models rather than provide a proposal for action. The model that I discuss here might be called the “UPS model”, or, more specifically, the Knowledge Chain Manager model.

Metrics of Academic Excellence for the 21st Century

What metrics of excellence will society use in determining the quality of research universities in the 21st century?  Will they be the same as those used to define the great universities of the 20th century? That is the question I addressed in a piece I wrote as input for our 2004 strategic planning process. It is  called Change and the Research University.