As an academic I am keenly aware of the controversy that has been swirling around education and its need for serious reform. Like many Americans I have firsthand experience with the kind of strain the cost of putting three kids through college has on a family of middle class means – not to mention having a front row seat to the angst the current model of creates surrounding everything from which school to choose, the process of admissions, and even the process of staying engaged once accepted.
However, my own problems are very different than those of my students many of whom are first generation college students, or the first in their families to go to graduate school. College to them is a promise of a brighter future to both them and their families – and I and my colleagues are working hard to help make good on that promise.
Around 150 years ago, on a state by state basis, the United States began to require some sort of attendance at the high school level. During much of the 20th century a high school diploma was seen as something to aspire to – due to the belief that it would go a long way toward assuring a comfortable middle class lifestyle. In practice this model worked until the later part of the 20th century.
College was a system for the elite to provide that their progeny an advantage over the general population – as late as 1970 only 10 percent of the U.S. population had a college degree. Through the centuries of development it has taken to get us to this point in the evolution of modern education, college has always been a privilege of the elite; which is why it should not be surprising that the current system is ill-suited to serve the general population.
Given this history it might be interesting to look at the current infrastructure and play with different thought experiments to figure out when the system will fail to meet the needs of the growing population who aspire to earn a college education. For example, today approximately 30 percent of U.S. adults over the age of 25 have a college degree. If we take the emotional aspects of how a college education has affected us personally, or how it might affect our children, it might be reasonable to assume a system designed to meet the needs of the elite would begin to fall apart once it starts to engage almost a third of the population. We might look at how colleges have historically assumed a mastery of writing, math, and basic scientific principles. We currently live in a world where 6 out of 10 community college students are placed in remedial classes. Or, we might simply question the skills that are being taught in college and ask if these skills are truly a match for what will be needed on a macro level in a future economy.
Logically this would seem to lead us to the conclusion that the current system is ill suited for a world where many Americans and Europeans assume a high school education has become in adequate to insure a middle class lifestyle. The real question is what should we as a collective do about it? The reaction of many people would be to fix the current model and make it available to the general population. However, I think this might be a mistake.
We might just have to begin to look at our definitions of what college or even what higher education is. When we look at truly disruptive innovations one common thread is that innovators often separate the goal from the current definition. The goal is not college the goal is success defined by some other metric that college should enable. With this in mind the innovator attacks the problem from a completely different perspective without the baggage of the past to meet the needs of a new population.
The recent announcement of the edx collaboration between MIT and Harvard on non-degree online education, or the work done by Bain and Company to redefine the process of education at University of North Texas Dallas campus (UNT-Dallas) might be efforts in this direction. In both cases the innovators looked at the current model of education and made an attempt to redefine part of the problem, and as is typical in disruptive innovation the initial attempts at change showed some need for refinement and at least some resistance from incumbent players.
The principles behind edx are that knowledge is what changes lives not degrees. The partner schools are spending over 30 million dollars to make the content of several of the courses available on the web for free. Students will not receive a degree from either of these institutions, but they will receive a grade and a certificate of completion for each course. However, recent efforts by MITx (the prototype for the new effort) have shown that 120,000 students signed up for a course in circuits and electronics and only 10,000 made through the midterm. Although this effort has helped over 10,000 people better understand the world of circuits and electronics the completion yield seems very low – and as of yet it is not clear how effective the knowledge has been in changing lives.
Bain and Company donated their time to redesign the process of education at the UNT-Dallas. As an outsider to the world of education this world redound management consulting firm was in a good position to question the process that has historically been used to execute the production of education. Bain and Company believes their proposed process could drop the cost of education from over $100,000 per student to under $30,000 per student. However, a large part of the process is dependent on the use of hybrid on-ground/on-line classes, year round schedules, and increasing the teaching load of the professors by at least 33 percent. As one might imagine the current staff of UNT-Dallas is none too pleased. This would dramatically change their employment agreement and many question the resulting quality that might result from their model.
It would seem that education is at an inflection point. What we know today as higher education will be very different in the future – and these changes will have global implications. I believe it is fair to say for the foreseeable future there may be a few changes, but the college and university structure as we know it will for the most part survive. However, if disruptive innovation follows its typical course there is a reasonable chance a new structure will begin to develop for the currently underserved populations – and this new form could ellipse the current form of higher education in the volume of the global population served. It is likely that future generations will see a need for higher education but the form of that education is still yet to be determined.
