It became quickly apparent that the panel’s framing setup – “Which universities will be the world’s top 10 universities in 20 years?” – wasn’t the right question. The issue isn’t who’s best: As Pradeep Khosla of Carnegie Mellon University said, the real question is about effectiveness by higher education overall. “Is every university that we have delivering on its potential… and creating the workforce that… the world needs?” And Bror Saxberg, Chief Learning Officer at Kaplan University, asked the question in another way: “Whom among our higher education institutions offers the greatest growth for their students?”
So what’s keeping universities from delivering the best value? For one, cost. Khosla said that if education and healthcare each continue grow at about 3% each year, in short period of time, education and healthcare care will together become about 25% of Gross Domestic Product. “Common sense tells us… that doesn’t make sense,” said Khosla flatly. Susan Desmond-Hellman of UCSF (and formerly president of Genentech) pointed out the cost from the customer’s perspective: She said that the debt load of the average student emerging from the UC system today is about $100,000.
One way that universities might reduce costs is to embrace online education. Mark Gorenberg of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners asked about how the panelists felt about MIT’s early initiative to put some of its courseware online. “When MIT did it, I thought it was actually a very bold step,” said Khosla. But he felt it wasn’t really as useful as it could have been, because – as one attendee mentioned – it wasn’t connected to the teaching experience: It was actually just pieces of courses. Saxberg pointed to Carnegie Mellon’s online learning, which does structure its online learning more as courses with teacher support.
Speaking of online training: Saxberg said that though most people think of Kaplan as a source of educational testing materials, that’s only a quarter of the company’s $2.6 billion in annual revenue. In fact, $1.5 billion comes from students in post-secondary education. “So, we are a major player in the higher education space.” Half of those students (about 100,000) in Kaplan University, a virtual institution with a range of online courses, and half in brick-and-mortar Kaplan schools, receiving training and certificates. “Our goal at Kaplan is to bring in non-traditional students,” which Saxberg says fits 75% of the people in the higher education system today.
The rest of the discussion ranged across ways that the existing educational system can better meet the requirements of students and society, and ended with some brief thoughts from some of the students in the group – one of whom suggested that cultural integration issues, starting with high school, are probably bigger than some of the adults in the room might think.
So what was missing from the dialog? It’s not clear to me that people within the system understand just how broken it is. There’s a massive disruption coming for higher education. Costs aren’t coming down. The long-term value of many degrees in the marketplace is questionable. And schools aren’t preparing students for frequent career change – which is becoming the norm, not the exception.
In January 2010, I helped to produce a conference on the future of higher education – DGREE – with our partner LENS Ventures, for Lumina Foundation. Traditional higher education institutions, we maintained, are the mainframes of today, as vertically integrated as any siloed system - physical plant (campus), course development, course delivery, and brand all wrapped into one. That’s a market and a mentality ripe for disruption, as companies like Kaplan and University of Phoenix – the latter now the largest educational institution in the U.S. If you want to see some visions of the disrupted higher education future, check out DGREE.org. Or look at what startups like PresenceTelecare.com are doing to deliver educational services over the Internet.
-gB
Gary A. Bolles, CEO, Xigi Inc., gary [at] xigi.biz
Endnote: Apologies to Mr. Saxberg for listing his name incorrectly in the original post.
One does not need to look at forecasts of future costs of education to pick out a perhaps overlooked gorilla in the room: the current cost of higher education -- a cost which has risen at over 10 times the rate of other costs in the past several decades.
By way of example, In 1970, the cost of room and board at an Ivy League university was $2000. One year of tuition was $2000. Currently, the cost of room and board is $4000, and one year of tuition is $40,000 !!
On top of that, institutions of higher education are behaving every bit as a cartel. Financial statements by parents of applicants are shared across the board, and the calculation for determining "financial aid", at least at private institutions, works basically by (1) establishing a very large "suggested retail price" for the cost of tuition (one which is out of reach by all except the very wealthy), and then (2) providing "assistance" to a degree that would just barely avoid insolvency of the revenue producer, the parents, and 'discounting' the high cost with a combination of grants and loans.
Couple that with both the perception and in part the reality that an undergraduate education is considered an essential rite of passage to even have a chance at starting out on the path to a successful life and career, and you have the makings of a gatekeeper that can collectively charge whatever it wants for the price of admission.
Also, those who have made a career within the citadels of academia naturally find the earning power of being a member of a select club quite enticing, and powerful.
Finally, the feeder system of public elementary and secondary education has fallen far behind and is not producing minimal skills in a sufficient percentage of the youth population.
Fortunately, electronically available sources of knowledge still make it possible for someone eager to learn and acquire knowledge.
As far as what the "top 10 schools" will be in 20 years, I agree that it is a completely self-serving and misguided question.
Posted by: TahoeBlue | August 05, 2010 at 10:37 PM