SwampFox

Innovative Disruption of Higher Education

Submitted by: John Warner on Feb 27, 2011 at 11:45 am Tagged with: Higher Education, Universities Source: The Chronical of Higher Education

Coming out of the financial crisis, major institutions around us are being reinvented, including higher education which is struggling to define what an "independently funded public university" looks like.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently had a very interesting article about how higher education is being disrupted. There has been a predictable pattern of the evolution of many higher education institutions. Normal schools originally created to train teachers evolved into community colleges with more majors. Community colleges created multiple colleges and the overhead associated with that to become universities modeled on research universities.

The article notes that:

Once the form is decided upon, organizations inevitably grow to meet its shape, academically and otherwise.

This is a huge insight, also seen in industry and government as well as academia. Harvard's Clayton Christensen discusses how at the start-up of an organization, the model is created to commercialize the product it is providing to customers. At some point an inflection is reached where the culture, processes and systems mature and this flips whereby now the only new products that can be provided are those that fit the business model. One of the most powerful competitive barriers comes from business model innovation, because even when market leaders see it often they can't morph themselves to address the upstart competitor effectively. It's where the idea of "Swamp Fox" as an analogy for innovation comes from.

Unfortunately many "universities" now provide an expensive, inferior product. Currently many are having their clocks cleaned by cost-efficient, for-profit colleges. There is much howling and gnashing of teeth that for-profit universities are providing inferior education and some are, but for others this is a smokescreen from those withering from competition. Too often public institutions aren't providing the quality that is needed either. The article notes:

There is nothing preventing public institutions from doing what for-profit colleges have already done—enroll tens of thousands of students in online courses.

Nothing, that is, but the institutional and cultural barriers of those in academia trapped by their belief that they know better than their customers how education should be delivered.

We need to be concerned about our high end research universities suffering from the same innovators dilemma, trying to model themselves on the next level up and ending up in the higher education food chain and ending up with an expensive, inferior product.

The budget crisis is an excellent opportunity for all higher education institutions, from the lowest to the highest, to transform into the high quality, cost efficient disruptors of the next level of higher education.