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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011
The Innovative University illustrates how higher education can respond to the forces of disruptive innovation , and offers a nuanced and hopeful analysis of where the traditional university and its traditions have come from and how it needs to change for the future. Through an examination of Harvard and BYU-Idaho as well as other stories of innovation in higher education, Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring decipher how universities can find innovative, less costly ways of performing their uniquely valuable functions. * Offers new ways forward to deal with curriculum, faculty issues, enrollment, retention, graduation rates, campus facility usage, and a host of other urgent issues in higher education * Discusses a strategic model to ensure economic vitality at the traditional university * Contains novel insights into the kind of change that is necessary to move institutions of higher education forward in innovative ways This book uncovers how the traditional university survives by breaking with tradition, but thrives by building on what it's done best.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Preface
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Introduction
Another Lens for Viewing the University
Our Purpose and Approach
Part One: Reframing the Higher Education Crisis
Chapter 1: The Educational Innovator's Dilemma
Voices of Warning from Within
Pressures from Without
The Educational Innovator's Dilemma
The Risk of Disruption
The DNA of the University
Bigger and Better
Two Schools of Thought
The Power of Uniqueness
Part Two: The Great American University
Chapter 2: Puritan College
The Advent of Secularization and Specialization
Transition Years
Chapter 3: Charles Eliot, Father of American Higher Education
Lessons from Europe
The Elective System: Having It All
A Harvard-Style Innovation
Everything at Its Best: Harvard Graduate Schools
Faculty Prerogatives and Influence
Student Freedom
Eliot's Influence on Secondary Education
Eliot's Innovative Influence
Chapter 4: Pioneer Academy
A High Regard for Education
The Early Years in Rexburg
Adopting Traits from the Great Universities
The DNA of Ricks Academy
Chapter 5: Revitalizing Harvard College
Lowell's Strategy
An Unsustainable Financial Reality
Fostering Community at Harvard
Breadth and Depth in the Curriculum
Lowell's Curricular Compromise
A Scholarly Solution Shop and an Instructional Value-Added Process
Promoting Student Excellence
Lowell and the Cause of Academic Freedom
Chapter 6: Struggling College
High Standards and Aspirations
Hard Economic Times
“The State Would Not Have It”
A Return to Religious Values and Growth Aspirations
Chapter 7: The Drive for Excellence
Conant's Meritocracy
Up-or-Out Tenure
Merit-Based Admissions
Harvard During World War II
The Rise of Government-Funded Research
The Redbook
The Redbook and High School Education
The Ivy Agreement
The Essential Genetic Structure
Harvard's Advantages
The Costs of Harvard DNA
Chapter 8: Four-Year Aspirations in Rexburg
Strategic Repositioning
A Bridge Too Far
Expanding in the 1960s
Chapter 9: Harvard's Growing Power and Profile
Fundraising Excellence
Explosive Expansion and Faculty Autonomy
Implications for Instruction
A Changing Student Body
Chapter 10: Staying Rooted
Rightsizing and Enhancing
“A First-Rate College”
Part Three: Ripe for Disruption
Chapter 11: The Weight of the DNA
Internal Strains
A Voice of Warning
Genetic Constraints
Chapter 12: Even at Harvard
A New General Education Program
The Harvard Endowment's Ups and Downs
Harvard's Recovery
Chapter 13: Vulnerable Institutions
Genetic Makeover
Overstretched and Underfunded Schools
Elusive Prestige
Chapter 14: Disruptive Competition
The Would-Be Academic Raider
A Level, High-Speed Playing Field
Disruptive Innovation
Part Four: A New Kind of University
Chapter 15: A Unique University Design
An Unexpected Announcement
Hinckley's Innovative Vision
Eyring's Exhortations
A Focus on Key Disciplines
Chapter 16: Getting Started
Heavyweight Teams and Administrative Engagement
A New Approach to Student Activities
Internships and Career-Oriented Majors
Chapter 17: Raising Quality
Presidential Interregnum
Three Imperatives
Resetting the Academic Calendar and Clock
A Model for Learning
Keys to Implementing the Learning Model
Foundations: A New Approach to General Education
Designing the Foundations Curriculum
Creating the Foundations Courses
Raising Quality Outside of the Classroom
The Necessity of Sacrifice
An Auditorium to Grow Into
Chapter 18: Lowering Cost
From Roxbury to Rexburg
The Challenge to Create High-Quality Online Courses
The Power of Peer Instruction
An Online Course Production System
Graduation Delays
The Creeping Major
Innovative Responses to the Creeping Major Problem
A University Report Card
Chapter 19: Serving More Students
High-Fidelity Higher Education
Enrollment Expansion I and the Fishbone
Enrollment Expansion II: From Rexburg to Manhattan
Customized Higher Education Pathways
The Next Steps
A Tremendous Cost Savings
Reciprocal Benefits
International Pathways
Realizing the Benefits of the New DNA
Part Five: Genetic Reengineering
Chapter 20: New Models
Transcending the Dichotomy
Vital Jobs to Be Done
What Universities Do Best
Unique Assets
The Efficiency Imperative
“Work That the World Wants Done”
Suicide by Imitation
Making Choices
Chapter 21: Students and Subjects
A Focused Choice of Students
The Student as Primary Constituent
Helping Students “Achieve the Dream”
Subject Matter Focus
Beyond the Rational Curriculum and the Formal Classroom
Chapter 22: Scholarship
A Scholarship Model Inherited from a Golden Age
The Scholarship Challenge for Modern-Day A. Lawrence Lowells
The Growing Challenge of Discovery Research
A Broader Definition of Scholarship
The Need for New Scholarship Incentives
The Tenure Debate
The Right Kind of Tenure
The Scholar's Out-of-Class Activities
Chapter 23: New DNA
Assessing Capabilities and Making Choices
Prerequisites for Successful Conversations about Tradeoffs
Different Types of Tradeoffs
General Genetic Recommendations
The Benefits of Growth and an Emphasis on Quality
You Get What You Measure
Meaningful Success Measures
Chapter 24: Change and the Indispensable University
Enhanced Freedom and Usefulness
Our Cautious Optimism
Pruning and Focusing
Notes
Preface
Introduction
Part I
Chapter 1: The Educational Innovator's Dilemma: Threat of Danger, Reasons for Hope
Part II
Chapter 2: Puritan College:
Chapter 3: Charles Eliot, Father of American Higher Education:
Chapter 4: Pioneer Academy:
Chapter 5: Revitalizing Harvard College:
Chapter 6: Struggling College
Chapter 7: The Drive for Excellence:
Chapter 8: Four-Year Aspirations in Rexburg:
Chapter 9: Harvard's Growing Power and Profile:
Chapter 10: Staying Rooted:
Part III
Chapter 11: The Weight of the DNA
Chapter 12: Even at Harvard:
Chapter 13: Vulnerable Institutions:
Chapter 14: Disruptive Competition:
Part IV
Chapter 15: A Unique University Design:
Chapter 16: Getting Started:
Chapter 17: Raising Quality:
Chapter 18: Lowering Cost:
Chapter 19: Serving More Students:
Part V
Chapter 20: New Models:
Chapter 21: Students and Subjects:
Chapter 22: Scholarship:
Chapter 23: New DNA:
Chapter 24: Change and the Indispensable University:
The Authors
Innosight Institute
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 2: Puritan College
Table 2.1 Harvard's Initial DNA, 1636–1707
Table 2.2 Harvard's Evolving DNA, 1708–1868
Chapter 3: Charles Eliot, Father of American Higher Education
Table 3.1 Harvard's Evolution in the Charles Eliot Era, 1869–1909
Chapter 4: Pioneer Academy
Table 4.1 The Unique Traits of Ricks Academy, 1888–1914
Chapter 5: Revitalizing Harvard College
Table 5.1 Harvard in the Lowell Era, 1909–1933
Chapter 6: Struggling College
Table 6.1 Ricks College Evolution, 1914–1944
Chapter 7: The Drive for Excellence
Table 7.1 Harvard Evolution in the Conant Era, 1933–1953
Table 7.2 Traditional University DNA
Chapter 8: Four-Year Aspirations in Rexburg
Table 8.1 Ricks College in the John Clarke Era, 1944–1971
Chapter 10: Staying Rooted
Table 10.1 Ricks College Evolution, 1972–1996
Chapter 14: Disruptive Competition
Table 14.1 Traditional versus Online University Traits
Chapter 15: A Unique University Design
Table 15.1 BYU-Idaho and Traditional University Traits
Chapter 16: Getting Started
Table 16.1 Innovations of the David Bednar Era, 1997–2004
Chapter 19: Serving More Students
Table 19.1 Innovations of the Kim Clark Era, 2005–Present
Table 19.2 A Comparison of Ricks College and BYU-Idaho, 2000–2010
Chapter 23: New DNA
Table 23.1 Recommended DNA Alterations
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1: The Educational Innovator's Dilemma
Figure 1.1 The Path of Sustaining Innovation.
Figure 1.2 The Path of Disruptive Innovation.
Chapter 7: The Drive for Excellence
Figure 7.1 Harvard's Institutional DNA.
Chapter 19: Serving More Students
Figure 19.1 Fishbone Analysis of Graduate Production
4
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Figure 19.2 Pathway Program Curricular Options.
Figure 19.3 Ricks College / BYU-Idaho's Institutional DNA.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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e1
The Innovative University
CHANGING THE DNA OF HIGHER EDUCATION FROM THE INSIDE OUT
Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring
Copyright © 2011 by Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring. All rights reserved.
Published by Jossey-Bass
A Wiley Imprint
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Excerpts from The Glass Bead Game (ISBN 978-0-312-27849-6) by Hermann Hesse used by permission of Picador.
Readers should be aware that Internet Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information may have changed or disappeared between the time this was written and when it is read.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Christensen, Clayton M.
The innovative university : changing the DNA of higher education from the inside out / Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring.
p. cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-118-06348-4 (hardback); 978-1-118-09125-8 (ebk); 978-1-118-09126-5 (ebk); 978-1-118-09127-2 (ebk)
1. Universities and colleges–United States. 2. Educational change–United States. I. Eyring, Henry J. II. Title.
LA227.4.C525 2011
378.73–dc22
2011015805
Preface
Because the research and writing of this book began and ended with Henry Eyring, I have written this preface so that our readers might glimpse what a privilege it has been for me to watch Henry's extraordinary mind and his selfless heart at work as we crafted this book.
In 2000, Ricks College, a two-year school in rural southern Idaho, became a four-year school, Brigham Young University (BYU)-Idaho. The creation of BYU-Idaho took almost everyone by surprise. It wasn't just that its sponsor, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (more commonly known as the Mormon Church) had a policy of preventing “mission creep” at its four institutions of higher learning.1 At least as surprising as the decision to make Ricks a four-year institution was its unique design. The new university would remain focused on undergraduate instruction: there would be no graduate programs and no traditional research scholarship. One of the most successful junior college athletic programs in the United States would be eliminated.
The university would also pursue new efficiencies. It would operate year-round, and new technologies, especially online learning, would be used to serve more students at lower cost. In becoming a university, the former Ricks College would actually operate more in the spirit of a community college than it had before.
At the time of BYU-Idaho's creation, Henry J. Eyring was at a sister institution, Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, directing the MBA program at the Marriott School of Management. A graduate of that program, Henry had been hired a few years earlier to help reverse a slide in its US News & World Report ranking, which had tied with Penn State for the last place in the top fifty MBA programs. The mandate was to move up quickly. Among other things, that meant becoming more selective in admissions; placing more students in higher-paying jobs; and bolstering the faculty's research and publication quality and quantity in order to enhance the program's reputation in the eyes of other academic leaders. These were crucial initiatives—and expensive ones.
This wasn't the first time Henry had seen the costs of operating at the upper heights of the academic hierarchy, however. As chief financial officer for the Huntsman Cancer Foundation, he approved outlays for medical research facilities and faculty salaries at the University of Utah's Huntsman Cancer Institute. Jon M. Huntsman Sr.'s initial commitments of more than $100 million were just enough to prime a pump that would need continual fueling by other sources, particularly federal research grants.
Thus, in 2000, the design of the new BYU-Idaho riveted Henry's attention. On a higher education landscape where the general goal is to move up notwithstanding the high cost of doing so, here was an institution focused on a relatively lowly niche. When, in 2005, Harvard Business School dean Kim Clark was named president of BYU-Idaho, Henry was among many who wondered whether the institution's strategy would change: Wouldn't an accomplished scholar and fundraiser from the world's preeminent business school attempt to raise the institution's prestige and profile?
In his inauguration address Kim squashed such speculation. As expected, he talked of raising the quality of a BYU-Idaho education. However, Kim projected a decline in the university's operating costs and an expansion of its reach to benefit even students in Africa. He admitted the difficulty of simultaneously raising the school's quality, decreasing its costs, and serving more students. But he spoke optimistically and with the credibility not only of a Harvard Business School dean but also as a distinguished scholar of operations management. Henry, who had met Kim only once, contacted him to learn more about his vision and then jumped at Kim's offer to join the BYU-Idaho team.
Working with Kim and his team proved as stimulating as expected—especially as Henry observed the differences between BYU-Idaho and most other universities. The people weren't fundamentally different: BYU-Idaho faculty members and administrators love learning and helping others learn, but that is true of almost everyone who embarks on an academic career. Somehow, though, the BYU-Idaho environment fostered unusual innovation and learning outcomes. Responding to his musings on these paradoxes one day, Henry's wife Kelly explained the difference with a metaphor: “BYU-Idaho has different DNA.”
The metaphor clicked. At the time Henry was reading a book called Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education.2 Author Harry Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College, begins the book with an overview of Harvard's history. He summarizes innovations that produced institutional features familiar to any college student: merit-based admissions and scholarships; general education and majors; grading curves and honors; intercollegiate athletes and faculty members striving for up-or-out tenure. Reading now with BYU-Idaho's unique traits in mind, Henry recognized Harvard as the source of much of the DNA of traditional universities, from long-established research institutions to up-and-coming regional schools.
The thought occurred to Henry to contrast the differences between the DNA of Harvard and BYU-Idaho by telling their stories from initial founding to the present. The comparison might show how other institutions could change their DNA as BYU-Idaho has done. Kim Clark initially questioned the idea. Given Henry's employment at BYU-Idaho and the fact that his father was president of its forerunner, Ricks College, from 1971 to 1977, there could be accusations of self-serving bias. Kim was also sensitive to the potential inference that BYU-Idaho considers its educational model somehow preferable to Harvard's. A holder of bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from Harvard, Kim knew that the two institutions are different species and literally incomparable.
Henry argued that that was exactly the point. His zeal for contrasting the DNA of BYU-Idaho and Harvard grew as Kim pointed out the features that make the latter different not only from the former but also from the many institutions that have attempted to copy Harvard. Kim described the intellectual stimulation of the Harvard house environment, with its tutors who showed him how to study more effectively and how to “navigate the system.” He told of being mentored by world-class scholars in graduate-level courses that were open to him as an undergraduate student.
Kim, who along with others well acquainted with Harvard, became a key advisor on the writing project, also talked about how much Harvard spends to simultaneously set the worldwide pace for scholarship and create a nurturing environment for all students, including undergraduates. The weight of that financial burden became generally apparent in 2009, as Harvard dealt with the budgetary fallout from a huge endowment loss. Henry realized that one reason other institutions struggle as they attempt to emulate Harvard is that essential elements of the DNA—especially Harvard's unrivaled wealth—are hard to copy.
As Henry studied the Harvard-emulation phenomenon, he recognized some of the pattern of disruptive innovation that I have found in so many industries. The theory of disruptive innovation asserts that in industries from computers to cars to steel those entrants that start at the bottom of their markets, selling simple products to less demanding customers and then improving from that foothold, drive the prior leaders into a disruptive demise. I was wrestling to explain the same issues in higher education, a natural next step after writing a book about disruptive innovation in public education. So when Henry invited me to join him in studying the past and future of higher education, I jumped at the chance.
We concluded that universities are an anomaly that my original framing of disruption could not explain. True, most entrants have indeed entered into the “low end” or “new market” of higher education, often as community colleges. And they have almost uniformly driven up-market to offer bachelor's and advanced degrees in more and more fields—just as the theory would predict. But the demise of the incumbents that characterizes most industries in the late stages of disruption has rarely occurred among colleges and universities. We have had entry, but not exit.
We identified three factors that resolved this anomaly. First, teaching. In the past, teaching was difficult to disrupt because its human qualities couldn't be replicated. In the future, though, teaching will be disruptable as online technology improves and shifts the competitive focus from a teacher's credentials or an institution's prestige to what students actually learn.
Second, we observed two distinct groups of college students who have different “jobs-to-be-done.” In one group, the campus experience is central to the college experience. For members of this group, the campus experience is hard to disrupt. Because of family and work responsibilities, however, students in the other group don't want to spend time on campus to earn a degree. They want to learn when they have time to learn—often after work, when their children are asleep. New entrants to higher education that focus on these potential students are indeed classic disruptors.
And the third reason why higher education has seen many new entrants but few exits is alumni and state legislators, who are “customers” of their institutions. Their support is typically driven not only by public spiritedness but also by deep personal relationships with faculty members and coaches who profoundly molded their lives. Alumni and state support gives traditional universities and colleges staying power unique to higher education.
These observations supported the finding of other studies that learning occurs best when it involves a blend of online and face-to-face learning, with the latter providing essential intangibles best obtained on a traditional college campus. I believe a more nuanced theory of higher education innovation emerged from our collaboration. The physical campuses and full-time faculty members of traditional universities and colleges can embrace online learning as a sustaining innovation—technology could make them stronger than ever. This is a different situation than the more straightforward dilemma that the newspapers and video rental stores faced when online technology knocked on their doors.
By the summer of 2010, Henry and I had revised the story of Harvard, BYU-Idaho, and disruptive innovation in higher education to the point of apparent diminishing returns. As I said on July 16, “Finishing a book like ours is like playing football on a logarithmic grid: regardless of how hard you work to cross the goal line with a perfect product, you see an eternity of additional work required to get there. At some point, you just have to declare victory, spike the ball and walk off the field.” We agreed that Henry would tighten the final part of the manuscript while I wrote a new introduction. Then we would call it good.
Two days later I suffered a stroke as I addressed a church group near MIT. A neurologist in the group recognized the slurring of my speech as a sign of stroke and admitted me to Massachusetts General Hospital, just five minutes away. The stroke rendered me unable to speak and write. Henry's able shoulders therefore had to carry not only his assignments but mine too, while I focused on learning again to speak and write. The delay brought unexpected benefits to the writing project. Most notably, the November 2010 release of a study called Winning by Degrees: The Strategies of Highly Effective Higher Education Institutions3 enriched the manuscript with its descriptions of the innovations of schools other than BYU-Idaho and Harvard. Henry did a magnificent job.
At a time when my persuasive abilities were still limited, Henry and the publishers concluded that our two names would appear alphabetically on the cover—because we both contributed all that we could. Our goal is to inspire today's higher education community to do what it did in the late 1800s, when Harvard and its peers created a new model of higher education. It was a model that built on the best traditions of U.S. and European institutions but added powerful innovations that took them all to greater heights. Along with the Morrill Act, which established the land-grant colleges, the new model dramatically expanded the quality and accessibility of higher learning, helping to fulfill Abraham Lincoln's dream of a “new birth of freedom.”
The technologies that now threaten to disrupt traditional universities and colleges can also reinvigorate them to the benefit of so many people. We hope that this book will help—that it will be widely read and debated. Our motive is not pecuniary; our royalties have been assigned to the Innosight Institute, our partner in promoting higher education innovation.
Henry and I love higher education. We appreciate what it has done for us, and we love the people who make it possible. They include not only teachers and administrators but also students and parents and taxpayers. This book is for them, in a spirit of love and hope.
Clayton M. Christensen and my magnificent partner in this effort, Henry J. Eyring
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to many people whose support and direction made this book possible. They include the following volunteers who generously read and commented on the manuscript. Each made it better, though none bears any blame for its flaws.
Josh Allen and the students of his BYU-Idaho professional editing class
Scott Anthony
Douglas Anderson
Devan Barker
Ross Baron
Michael Bassis
David Bednar
Susan Bednar
Robert Bird
Derek Bok
Jack Brittain
Molly Corbett Broad
Fenton Broadhead
Merv Brown
Kelly Burgener
Mary Carter
Max Checketts
Kim Clark
Jordan Clements
Hyrum Conrad
Maureen Devlin
Rob Eaton
Jason Earl
Tom Eisenmann
Glenn Embree
Henry B. Eyring
Henry C. Eyring
Matthew Eyring
Mark Fuller
Gordon Gee
Clark Gilbert
Mary Glenn
Jack Harrell
Roger Hoggan
Matt Holland
Steve Hunsaker
John Ivers
Shawn Johansen
Paul Johnson
Todd Kelson
Jorge Klor de Alva
Bruce Kusch
Martha Laboissier
Michael Leavitt
Paul Le Blanc
Nicholas Lemann
Doug Lederman
Harry Lewis
Kent Lundin
Michael Madsen
Scott McKinley
Louis Menand
Joel Meyerson
Todd Nelson
Reed Nielsen
Rulon Nielsen
Jeffrey Olson
Luba Ostashevsky
Ric Page
Greg Palmer
David Peck
Chase Peterson
Richard Pieper
Michael Porter
LaNae Poulter
Stephen Prescott
Martin Raish
Kirk Rawlins
Henry Rosovsky
Cecil Samuelson
Matt Sanders
Len Schlesinger
Rhonda Seamons
Mack Shirley
Steven Snow
Louis Soares
Danny Stern
Richard Tait
John Thomas
Eric Walz
Steve Wheelwright
Alan Young
Michael Young
We received extraordinary professional support in the production of the book. Jesse Wiley correctly described his Jossey-Bass colleague Sheryl Fullerton as “simply perfect for the job” of editing the manuscript. Along with her teammates, Alison Knowles and Joanne Clapp Fullagar, Sheryl exceeded all reasonable expectations of effort and skill.
We are similarly grateful to Danny and Susan Stern and their gifted team at Stern + Associates: Millie Mortan, Laura Moss, Jim Nichols, Adria Tomaszewski, and Ned Ward. Each of them improved the book and played a vital role in publicizing it. The same is true of our Innosight Institute colleague Michael Horn.
We are particularly indebted to Clay's assistant Lisa Stone, who kept the channel of communication between us open as he experienced and miraculously recovered from a severe stroke. Lisa also helped us see the holes in our thinking and made brilliant suggestions for filling them. She is a friend of remarkable dedication, optimism, and talent.
For Christine, who keeps my mind sharp amidst everything else
—Clay Christensen
To Kelly, who suggested the DNA metaphor
— Henry Eyring
IntroductionRipe for Disruption—and Innovation
Just how much trouble is American higher education in, really? The answer may vary greatly depending on your primary source of information. If you rely mainly on the news media and books, things look grim. State legislators seem to be at war with their own public institutions; higher education, the largest discretionary item in the state budget, is on the chopping block. At a national level, the United States appears to be in educational decline relative to countries in which college participation and completion is steadily rising. From campuses come books by university scholars who cite research and personal experience in declaring their institutions to be broken.
If you are the parent of a college student, this disturbing picture finds some support in your personal experience. Notwithstanding all the talk of growing federal financial aid, you may have stretched to the breaking point to send your child to a well-regarded school. Then you receive reports of unavailable courses, inadequate academic counseling, and hard-to-access professors. The learning experience, though it carries a much higher price tag, sounds reminiscent of your own college days, dominated by textbooks, lectures, and multiple choice exams. Other than the increased cost, the only thing that sounds significantly different is the amount of partying going on (though your memory may be selective on that point).
If your student is attending a public institution, progress toward graduation seems haphazard and slow: by the end of what should be your student's junior year there may be no set date for graduation. Your child, in fact, has almost a 50 percent chance of failing to finish at all.1 (The problem exists at private institutions as well, though not with the same severity.) At graduation there may be no job in his or her field of study. Your debt-laden college graduate may return home from the search with news that good employment requires a master's degree.
If you are a college professor or administrator, you appreciate these views but see things a little differently. You read the papers, and you may have children of your own in college. But you appreciate the paradoxes at the heart of American higher education. For decades, you have heard complaints about its ineffectiveness and high cost, as well as its statistical decline relative to other countries. Yet you know that what Henry Rosovsky, former dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, wrote in 1990 remains true: “Fully two thirds to three quarters of the best universities are located in the United States.”2 In fact, if anything, the dominance of the American university model has increased since Dean Rosovsky made his declaration. In 2010, the Academic Ranking of World Universities, which measures achievements such as Nobel Prize awards and scholarly publications, listed seventeen U.S. institutions among the top twenty globally; of the top fifty universities, thirty-six were American.3 Rosovsky's rhetorical follow-up question about U.S. higher education preeminence seems to apply today with the same force it did in 1990: “What sector of our economy and society can make a similar statement?”4
As a professor or administrator, you hear complaints that your institution exalts scholarship above teaching as well as the insinuation that your compensation is what makes higher education increasingly more expensive. Yet you know firsthand that tuition is not raised to pay the faculty more—your salary is rising much more slowly than overall institutional costs and tuition prices.5 And the number of highly paid administrators is small relative to the total operating budget.
Nor are students' preferences ignored. In fact, in large measure it is an obsession with attracting students that drives up the institution's cost. What is most different about today's colleges and universities is not the price of the professoriate and administration but the cost of scholarships and financial aid, physical facilities, Internet access, and intercollegiate athletic teams—all things that matter to students as they choose one school over another. Rankings measure other things of importance to students: student–teacher ratios; graduation rates; student and alumni satisfaction; academic reputation. To a significant degree, colleges and universities have become expensive as a result of attempting to attract the most capable and discerning student-customers, not because of trying to accommodate employees.
As a college or university employee, you also know your own motives. You didn't pay the high price in time and money of getting an advanced degree because of the potential financial rewards. The decision to give a lifetime to higher education was about learning and sharing that learning. It certainly wasn't about giving students the short end of the stick. Notwithstanding the intense pressure on faculty members to publish, nationwide surveys indicate that they value teaching as highly as scholarly research.6 For every research superstar seeking international acclaim and association only with graduate students, there are many professors who value not only scholarship but also teaching and mentoring undergraduates.7
University Versus College: What's in a Name?
Throughout this book, sidebars like this one offer commentary and provide examples to clarify the main story. Higher education is a complex world with unique practices and terms, and a bit of explanation and illustration can be helpful even to insiders. For instance, between one-half and two-thirds of the 17.8 million studentswho were “going to college” in the U.S. in 2006 were actually attending institutions bearing the name university. The others were enrolled in a school called by the name college, institute, or some similar label.8
For our purposes, we simply use the term university. Many colleges don't perform all of the functions that universities do, scholarly research and granting Ph.D. degrees being leading examples. But the things that most traditional colleges do, particularly the ways they educate students, have been determined largely by universities. That's true, for example, of the way that college instruction is divided up into semester-long courses. It's also true of the expectation that full-time college professors have advanced degrees. Because of these similarities, we'll find that many of the threats and opportunities facing traditional institutions of higher education are the same for both universities and colleges. Our illustrations of those threats and opportunities include institutions bearing both names, including some community colleges and technical institutes.
Another Lens for Viewing the University
We authors, Clayton and Henry, share all of these views of universities—we read news reports and books about them, we have children at school, and we enjoy working at our respective universities. But we also have another lens for viewing the challenges facing universities. That lens is called the “theory of disruptive innovation.” Our purpose in writing this book is to apply this lens to reveal both the serious threats and the great opportunities facing traditional universities. Seen through the lens of disruptive innovation theory, universities are at a critical crossroad. They are both at great risk of competitive disruption and potentially poised for an innovation-fueled renaissance.
The current crisis in today's universities is real, and much of it is of the universities' own making. In the spirit of honoring tradition, universities hang on to past practices to the point of imperiling their futures. When reduced budgets force them to cut costs, they trim but rarely make hard tradeoffs. Nor do they readily reinvent their curricula to better prepare students for the increasing demands of the world of work. Paradoxically, they respond to economic downturn by raising prices. From a market competition standpoint, it is slow institutional suicide. It is as if universities do not care about what is going on around them or how they are perceived.
With traditional universities charging more and seemingly engendering in students fewer of the skills needed to succeed in the global workplace, students, parents, and policymakers are naturally drawn to alternative forms of higher education. For-profit universities and technical institutes, though expensive relative to public institutions and in some cases of dubious quality, are more convenient and more attuned to students' needs, especially the need for marketable skills. Significantly for taxpayers and legislators, they fund their own operations. Given these private sector alternatives, traditional universities seem to deserve no more support or sympathy than tradition-bound steel mills, automakers, or airlines.
But that is not the case. The traditional university is still indispensable. Mastering the challenges and opportunities presented by a fast-paced, global society requires more than just basic technical skill and cognitive competence. Young college students in particular need an environment in which they can not only study but also broaden their horizons and simply “grow up.” Though for-profit educators can play important, complementary roles in higher education, the ideal of the traditional university, with its mix of intellectual breadth and depth, its diverse campus social milieu, and its potentially life-changing professors, is needed now more than ever.
Yet to play its indispensable function in the new competitive environment, the typical university must change more quickly and more fundamentally than it has been doing. Invaluable strengths notwithstanding, the way it has historically operated has become too expensive. Its unique design, created by visionary leaders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has until recently gone unchallenged and thus largely unaltered. Now innovation is disrupting the status quo. For the first time since the introduction of the printed textbook, there is a new, much less expensive technology for educating students: online learning. Simultaneously, more outcome-oriented accreditation standards have begun to level the competitive playing field; it is no longer as important to evidence educational capacity via brick-and-mortar facilities and Ph.D.-trained faculty as to demonstrate student learning. The combination of disruptive technology and increased focus on educational outcomes opens the door to new forms of competition, particularly from the private sector. This is a situation ripe for disruption, a concept that Clayton researched and wrote about in his book The Innovator's Dilemma.9
Disruptive Innovation and the University
The theory of disruptive innovation, which we'll apply throughout this book, holds that there are two main types of innovation. The first type, sustaining innovation, makes something bigger or better. Examples of sustaining innovations include airplanes that fly farther, computers that process faster, cell phone batteries that last longer, televisions with clearer images, and universities with more college majors and better activity centers. Industry leaders almost always win the battles to create these sustaining innovations, not only because of their financial resources, but also because their expertise in traditional practices gives them an advantage in making things bigger and better.10
A disruptive innovation, by contrast, disrupts the bigger-and-better cycle by bringing to market a product or service that is not as good as the best traditional offerings but is more affordable and easier to use. Online learning is an example. Particularly in its infancy, when Internet speeds were low and many online courses were simply computer-based versions of traditional lectures and exams, the quality of online learning fell far below that of face-to-face instruction. Only consumers who couldn't attend a class offered at just one place and time, such as working adults, found this new form of education attractive or at least tolerable. For them, the definition of quality was different—a computer-based lecture that you could consume late at night in your own home beat a face-to-face class requiring a commute and a strict schedule.
Disruptive innovation is thus initially a boon to nonconsumers of a product or service. Traditional providers ignore it, assuming that their current clientele won't be interested. But as the disruptive innovation improves—by its own sustaining innovations—it becomes a threat to traditional providers. For example, online course developers not only add features such as video conferencing that make the online course more like a classroom setting, they also create online tutorials and student discussion forums that the traditional face-to-face course doesn't provide. Because the underlying technology offers advantages in cost and ease of use, these quality innovations gradually improve the product to the point that even students at traditional institutions find it appealing.
Though traditional universities continue to perform the critical, unique functions of discovering and preserving knowledge and of educating students in face-to-face communities of scholars, they also face disruptive innovations that call for reexamination. If they cannot find innovative, less costly ways of performing their uniquely valuable functions, they are doomed to decline, high global and national rankings notwithstanding. Fortunately, such innovation is within their power.
Our duty is to wholly reinvent ourselves. We are America's future—intellectually, socially, culturally.11
—Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University
The university's innovations must be informed by self-awareness and by an understanding of history. The typical university and college succeeded in the past by emulating a group of elite research institutions, Harvard University foremost among them.12 Smaller institutions grew, for example, by adding subjects of study and offering more advanced degrees. For much of the twentieth century, that strategy of emulation proved highly successful. As community and state colleges slowly but steadily made themselves into universities, they brought higher education to the masses and contributed to the advance of knowledge and of social and economic welfare; taxpayers and donors willingly contributed to the cause, inspired by the institutional growth and the benefits that flowed from it.
Now, though, the standard model has become unsustainable. To avoid disruption, institutions of higher education must develop strategies that transcend imitation. They must also master the disruptive technology of online learning and make other innovations. Strategies for doing so are the focus of this book.
Our Purpose and Approach
Charting an effective future course for institutions as venerable and complex as universities requires a thorough understanding not only of the present state of affairs but also of the past. Thus, in this book, we'll study together the evolution of the paradoxical American university. We'll discover why the university is simultaneously world-leading and domestically derided, research driven and student dependent, technologically outdated and socially indispensable.
Studying the university's history and confronting these paradoxes will allow us to move beyond the forlorn language of crisis to hopeful and practical strategies for success. We'll see that to survive, established universities will have to break with tradition. But we'll also find that to thrive they must build on what they have always done best. We'll look at more than a dozen institutions that are doing that.
Look to your roots, in order to reclaim your future.13
—Ghanaian proverb, quoted by Mary Sue Coleman, president of University of Michigan
This book is meant to engage all who share an interest in the fate of higher education, which ought to be everyone: students, parents, alumni, employers, taxpayers, legislators, and other policymakers. A particularly important audience, though, is faculty and administrators; they have the power to lead traditional universities and colleges from within, which is the only way it can be done well.
The pages that follow offer insights into the paradoxical behavior of universities and the kind of innovation and change that is necessary to ensure their vitality. In particular, we'll explore the tendency of universities to copy the elite research institutions such as Harvard. Because of Harvard's extraordinary influence, we'll study it in detail in Part II of this book, The Great American University. We'll explore Harvard's evolution over nearly four hundred years and see how it has served as a prototype for other institutions. One can think of it as having established the institutional “DNA,” or the fundamental organizational traits, that other universities have copied.
Harvard offers its undergraduate students a vast curriculum spanning the arts and sciences. It also operates more premier professional schools and sets the standard of research excellence in more disciplines than any other institution of higher learning. Harvard incurs tremendous costs in achieving such wide-ranging excellence; its annual operating budget approaches $4 billion.14 Fortunately, a gargantuan endowment and apparently unlimited demand for its high-priced degrees allow it to bear these expenses, at least in good economic times.
As we'll see in Part III, Ripe for Disruption, the Harvard model, which was not fully understood by the many institutions that have copied it, is now unsustainable for all but a few. Most universities cannot afford to offer so many subjects to such diverse types of students or to require their professors to compete in a world of research scholarship that is becoming increasingly expensive and conceptually narrow. The burden of these choices, adopted by Harvard emulators lacking the financial resources necessary to bear them, have made most American-style universities vulnerable to competitive disruption.
In Part IV, A New Kind of University, we'll encounter an institution, Brigham Young University (BYU)-Idaho, that embodies a different university model. Compared to Harvard, BYU-Idaho hardly makes the traditional higher education map. It is tucked away in rural southeast Idaho and is still in its infancy as a university. Yet BYU-Idaho provides a useful case study because it is a fresh experiment that demonstrates the potential for traditional universities to harness the power of disruptive innovation.
BYU-Idaho's founders created the university in 2000 from a two-year institution, Ricks College, that had few of the traits of the great academic research institutions; these innovators had the opportunity to design a university essentially from scratch. As they did so, they considered the needs of twenty-first-century college students and the strengths and shortcomings of the traditional university model, particularly in light of new learning technologies and their own institutional mission. In the end, BYU-Idaho's designers made unusually focused choices about the range of students to be served and the subjects to be taught. They defined scholarship unusually broadly, to include and even emphasize the scholarship of learning. In effect, they created a new species of university, one genetically different from Harvard.
Neither Harvard nor BYU-Idaho alone is a practical model for most established universities. The one is inimitably prestigious and powerful. The other had unusual starting conditions that allowed a radical redesign. Yet their unique missions and traits notwithstanding, the evolutionary histories of Harvard and BYU-Idaho illustrate the types of strategic choices for traditional universities to consider and provide examples of alternative ways in which they might be made. BYU-Idaho is representative of institutions that are pursuing models that blend the traditional, Harvard-inspired model and the disruptive approach of the purely online educators. In addition to our in-depth study of Harvard and BYU-Idaho, we'll also look at more than a dozen other innovative schools, many profiled in a 2010 McKinsey & Company report, Winning by Degrees: The Strategies of Highly Productive Higher Education Institutions.15
McKinsey's Winning by Degrees
In 2010, McKinsey & Company, one of the world's largest and most highly regarded consulting companies, undertook a study of U.S. higher education, with financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. McKinsey's goal was to determine whether increased productivity by colleges and universities—without increased spending—could contribute substantially to the nation's higher education needs. The McKinsey team began by quantifying the average cost incurred by all institutions to produce one associate's or bachelor's degree: $56,289 and $74,268, respectively.16
The team then identified institutions with significantly lower costs per degree granted. They chose for further study five bachelor's degree-granting universities whose costs ranged from a high of $52,285 to a low of $27,495—roughly one-third to two-thirds less than the average, and in all cases less than the cost of the typical associate's degree. Three of these institutions, Southern New Hampshire University, Indiana Wesleyan University, and BYU-Idaho, are “traditional” private nonprofit schools that deliver the majority of their instruction in face-to-face classrooms. Another institution, Western Governors University, is a highly innovative nonprofit that offers online competency-based instruction; students neither gather in classrooms nor spend a set amount of time studying. The fifth institution, DeVry University, is a private sector company that offers degrees both online and face to face.
McKinsey also looked at two community colleges and a system of state technical institutes. One of the community colleges, Florida's Valencia Community College, grants both associate's degrees and technical certificates; at $22,311 per associate's degree granted, Valencia's cost is only 40 percent of the national average. The other community college, Arizona's Rio Salado College, grants primarily certificates. A pioneer in the use of online learning, it enrolls more online students than any other community college in the nation. The technical institute system, Tennessee Technology Centers, confers technical certificates with markedly higher completion rates than the national average.
In-depth study of these eight institutions led the McKinsey team to conclude that their practices, if broadly applied, would allow the U.S. to match the world's leaders in educational attainment without increased expenditure. We'll explore new university models like the ones profiled by McKinsey in Part V, Genetic Reengineering. We'll see that universities must define themselves in individual terms rather than emulating others. They must become much more affordable, particularly by embracing online learning technology. At the same time, though, they should make the most of their full-time professors and physical campuses, which might be misperceived as a competitive liability in a world of technological disruption. In fact, the university's professors and face-to-face meeting spaces, while expensive, are unique and potentially invaluable. They allow the university to perform functions that other institutions cannot. Among them are the critical jobs of discovering new knowledge, preserving the discoveries of the past, and mentoring the rising generation. Universities that adapt to the new competitive environment, drawing on their historical strengths even as they transcend Harvard imitation and embrace new technologies, can have a bright future.
Our journey through the past, present, and future of higher education begins with Harvard's founding, in the early 1600s. First, though, in Chapter One we return briefly to 2006, a year of portents and warnings.
Part OneReframing the Higher Education Crisis
Times of terror and deepest misery may be in the offing. But if any happiness at all is to be extracted from that misery, it can only be a spiritual happiness, looking backward toward conservation of the culture of earlier times, looking forward toward serene and stalwart defense of the things of the spirit in an age which otherwise might succumb wholly to material things.1
Reverend Father Jacobus
The Glass Bead Game, by Hermann Hesse
Chapter 1The Educational Innovator's Dilemma: Threat of Danger, Reasons for Hope
No one could doubt that U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings meant business. In upbraiding the nation's universities and colleges, the 2006 report of her commission on the future of higher education used the language and metaphors of business:
What we have learned over the last year makes clear that American higher education has become what, in the business world, would be called a mature enterprise: increasingly risk-averse, at times self-satisfied, and unduly expensive. It is an enterprise that has yet to address the fundamental issues of how academic programs and institutions must be transformed to serve the changing educational needs of a knowledge economy. It has yet to successfully confront the impact of globalization, rapidly evolving technologies, an increasingly diverse and aging population, and an evolving marketplace characterized by new needs and paradigms.
History is littered with examples of industries that, at their peril, failed to respond—or even to notice—changes in the world around them, from railroads to steel manufacturers. Without serious self-examination and reform, institutions of higher education risk falling into the same trap, seeing their market share substantially reduced and their services increasingly characterized by obsolescence.1
Not surprisingly, such confrontational, business-oriented language provoked controversy. During its drafting, the Spellings Commission report had been described by one of its own members as “flawed” and “hostile.”2 Higher education officials and lobbyists agreed when they read the official report. Many saw it as a politically motivated attack that overlooked the fundamental mission and spirit of higher education. The report's comparison of higher learning to railway transportation and steel manufacturing was, at the individual level, an inapt analogy: the process of smelting steel offers little insight into the delicate task of molding a mind. And to speak of universities and colleges as having market share is to imply disregard for higher education's noneconomic role in creating knowledge and promoting social well-being.
Yet it was difficult to rebut many of the Spellings Commission report's most serious indictments—that fewer U.S. adults are completing post-high school degrees; that the costs of attending college are rising faster than inflation; that employers report hiring college graduates unprepared for the workplace.3
The Glass Bead Game
In his novel Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game), Nobel literature laureate Hermann Hesse describes an isolated community of scholars in fictional Castalia, a political province set apart as a sanctuary for learning, where the scholars run a boarding school for boys.4 For the most elite of these scholars, however, the real interest is an abstract intellectual game that rewards individual contemplation. The Glass Bead Game, which takes years of training to master, is said to have existed from time immemorial. Its procedures and rules are described as a strict “secret language.” It forbids “private,” value-based judgments, recognizing only “legitimate,” objective observations. In the words of Hesse's narrator, “Any enrichment of the language of the Game by addition of new content is subject to the strictest possible control by the directorate of the Game.”5
Hesse's protagonist, a young student named Joseph Knecht, enjoys the nurturing of scholarly mentors who assume the stature of saints in his eyes; one of the most influential is the kindly, optimistic Father Jacobus. With the help of these mentors, Knecht becomes a master of the Glass Bead Game. It is the highest of intellectual honors. Yet with the passage of time and a growing personal awareness of the turmoil outside of Castalia, Knecht begins to wonder about his institution's role in the world. The questions with which he grapples, and the answers to which he comes, offer insights useful in higher education today. We will revisit Castalia and its Glass Bead Game from time to time throughout this book.
Voices of Warning from Within
The Spellings Commission was not a lone voice of criticism in 2006. That same year two distinguished academics, Derek Bok and Harry Lewis, both of Harvard, published books critical of higher education. Though eschewing—and, in Lewis's case, rejecting—the business terms and competitive logic of the Spellings Commission report, these seasoned academic administrators were no less vocal about the shortcomings of higher education. Bok, a former president of Harvard University, titled his book Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More. Lewis, a forty-year veteran and former dean of Harvard College, the sub-unit of the university that serves undergraduate students, detailed its defects in a work called Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education.
Bok's work was the more diplomatic of the two, as befitting a senior Harvard statesman who twice presided over the university. Yet Bok sounded his alarm with language reminiscent of the Spellings Commission's allusions to market forces. Having summarized the growing threat of global competition, he warned:
In view of these developments, neither American students nor our universities, nor the nation itself, can afford to take for granted the quality of higher education and the teaching and learning it provides. To be sure, professors and academic leaders must keep proper perspective. It is especially important to bear in mind all the purposes universities serve and to resist efforts to turn them into instruments preoccupied primarily with helping the economy grow. But resisting commercialization cannot become an excuse for resisting change. Rather, universities need to recognize the risks of complacency and use the emerging worldwide challenge as an occasion for a candid reappraisal to discover whether there are ways to lift the performance of our institutions of higher learning to higher levels.6
