Transforming Education.

By the time Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka met with me last summer for an interview about my involvement with higher-education reform efforts in Texas, I—and fellow reformers—had already been painted as barbarians at the gate by the academic establishment. All for a handful of commonsense suggestions for reform that almost anyone running any other kind of organization wouldn’t bat an eye over.

So it was refreshing to read a rather even-handed, objective assessment of events in Texas Monthly’s October cover story. For anyone following reform efforts in Texas, there wasn’t much new in the article, but it was the most complete, most fair take on the debate I’ve seen so far. 

I would like, however, to make a few things even clearer, specifically regarding teaching and research, the two things for which reformers often are villainized for even daring to bring into question.

I am for great, transformational teaching and teachers and for world-changing research, wherever it’s conducted. I’ve taught for over twenty years and have worked with and befriended hundreds of teachers. Not long ago, in fact, we held an event to officially honor over thirty of them from all over the country. And last year’s insights into UT-Austin’s productivity and affordability revealed not only star teachers, but star researchers as well.

But a serious problem in higher education today is our institutions’ addiction to “prestige.” No longer does it matter that academic research be necessarily important—meaning that, on balance, it is productive and that it benefits stakeholders outside of academia. Rather it is “important” solely when highly esteemed professors and administrators say it is, even if the results of it exist in obscure journals and reports that few outside academia will ever read or find valuable. And how it’s valued within the system itself is based on a perverse incentive structure that prizes research, no matter how obscure, over teaching, no matter how excellent.

It’s a self- referential, self-preserving system that too often favors status over substance, which means that productivity and intellectual objectivity go by the wayside. Many inside the system know this already. Few will talk about it or challenge it openly.  

And what’s the logical conclusion of all this misalignment and perversion? What’s the price of “prestige”? It is, as the New York Times has reported, an environment ripe for corruption and deception:

In fact, several colleges in recent years have been caught gaming the system—in particular, the avidly watched U.S. News & World Report rankings—by twisting the meanings of rules, cherry-picking data or just lying. […] [R]epeated revelations of manipulation show the importance of the rankings in the minds of prospective students, their guidance counselors, parents, the alumni considering donations, the professors weighing job offers—and, of course, the colleges themselves.

We don’t tolerate corporations like Enron submitting false financial reports just to keep the stock price high. Falsely touting fake earnings is fraud in the business world. Using prestige (and its currency: rankings) as a way to avoid criticism or transparency or accountability should be equally fraudulent in academia, a place that purports to seek out truth.

Here’s the reality of higher education today:

1. The cost to get a diploma continues to outpace inflation, per-capita personal income, and consumer prices, and, furthermore, it doesn’t even match the diploma’s value in the real world.
2. Rapidly devaluing academic credentials place young people in enormous, non-dischargeable debt.
3. Teaching is subordinate to research of curious value, even though parents and taxpayers are told otherwise.
4. The academic establishment gets anxious and defensive with any attempt to examine its productivity, accountability, or affordability—often with the rather insulting justification that it’d be just too complex for the rest of us to understand.

There’s never been a better, more important time to muster the courage and perseverance to keep asking tough questions about value in higher education and about the near ironclad caste system in academia that advantages the few at the sake of the many. Our future generations deserve a world-class education, not the promise of hollow prestige.

Acton students leave with MBAs, of course, but they don’t leave as “MBA Hares.”*

And with the changes to the program we’re enacting this year, that distinction will become even starker. The gist of the changes—the most substantial in ten years—is this: we’re moving even further toward simulating what it’s like to be a real entrepreneur, in the trenches, launching a business.

In other words, it’ll be more impossible than ever for an MBA Hare—who’s more business style than substance—to bounce through Acton. And, naturally, wantrepeneurs need not apply.

The article in the spring issue of Philanthropy covered some of changes to the traditional MBA format we made when we first branched out ten years ago: cutting the MBA from two years to one, nixing tenure, hiring only teachers who’ve been successful entrepreneurs. This year we take it further:

1. First, we’ve cut program length again, this time from a year to nine months. But the workload will be just as intense—if not more so.
2. Second, the first four months of the program will be delivered online, via Acton’s My Entrepreneurial Journey platform. Apart from a few on-site events to bring everyone together during these first few months, everything will be delivered online in interactive simulations, games, and exercises. Each of which challenges the student to (1) dig deep inside themselves to get a clearer picture of the kind of entrepreneur they want to be and (2) test and hone their business instincts in real-world experiments.

Why are we doing all this? For one, the “ivory tower of academia,” as the Wall Street Journal put it recently—“is toppling.” (This clearly isn’t news to anyone who reads Transforming Education.) And one of the reasons it’s toppling is because of the perfect storm it’s found itself and its constituents in: meteoric tuition hikes with no end in sight; a trillion dollars worth of student loan debt; iron, obsolete academic bureaucracies; and a one of the most competitive job markets for college graduates in decades.

Acton’s never been under that storm, but our new approach—which incorporates a more pronounced blending-learning component than we’ve ever used before—aligns the program even more closely with the kinds of interactive, student-centered, real-world-results-oriented programs that are on the rise.

*Do you fit an entrepreneur archetype? Take this quiz to find out.

There’s an encouraging trend developing: reportage on the revolution happening in education is moving further away from the fringe and toward a more mainstream audience. In the last few weeks, the Washington Post has asked, “Do college professors work hard enough?”, which, while still sensational, would have sounded like blasphemy a year or two ago. The Wall Street Journal is using words like “revolutionary” to describe what traditional-university refugees like Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun are doing. More below.

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The Washington Post recently pointed out higher education’s quality-of-learning gap  and highlighted UT-Austin in particular:

Last year, UT freshmen scored an average 1261 on the [College Learning Assessment], which is graded on a scale similar to that of the SAT. Seniors averaged 1303. Both groups scored very well, but seniors fared little better than freshmen […]

We’ve talked about quality of learning on college campuses before—these UT numbers aren’t too surprising, and they’re on par with many of the universities that authors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa highlighted in Academically Adrift, and with what those same authors have said elsewhere regarding current priorities in higher education.

The more troubling number is UT-Austin’s ranking in the CLA:  

For learning gains from freshman to senior year, UT ranked in the 23rd percentile among like institutions. In other words, 77 percent of universities with similar students performed better.

According to UT faculty cited in the article, some initiatives are being taken that could make a dent in that disappointing ranking, including a “signature course” that might help incoming undergrads address the “who am I?” and “what am I doing here?” questions.

But I fear that without a serious, systematic attempt to make the quality and effectiveness of undergraduate education a top mission, UT—or any university with disappointing CLA scores—won’t find the results they’re looking for, especially in this age of disruption. 

This month we officially launched the Acton Education Innovation Challenge, which pairs aspiring education disruptors with successful CEOs and entrepreneurs who are changing the face of education in the United States. Registration is open until May 18.

It’s all part of a larger effort to match rising stars with legends (we call them “Guides”) in their respective fields. (We’ve also developed a real estate and an energy challenge.)

But it’s not a “networking” event. And it’s not a “business plan” competition either. We’ve scanned the landscape of events like those before and feel that many of them come up wanting. Jeff Neeley, the Acton MBA alumnus we’ve got spearheading the challenge, sums it up like this:

“You never hear a successful entrepreneur attribute his success to his ability to write a business plan. Yet the majority of the business school competitions out there are nothing more than business plan competitions. They offer a carrot that typically leads nowhere.”

The idea of each challenge is twofold:

1. To provide participants with some of the entrepreneurial skills, frameworks, and relationships that will help them leap to the next level—and, perhaps, to even run their own companies.
2. To provide a setting in which these participants can prove what they’ve got to leaders in their industries.

How it works

The Education Innovation Challenge is built to produce a single grand prize winner, chosen in September, who will get to choose between $10,000 cash or a $50,000 fellowship to the Acton MBA program. But there’s value for all participants in each successive step of the event: at each level, participants will have the change to forge relationships, hone their entrepreneurial skills and instincts, and learn a lot about themselves.

To qualify, applicants must first complete a series of assignments meant to highlight  their initiative, brainpower, and passion for changing education in America. Those selected will be invited to a half-day event at the Acton campus in Austin, Texas to meet the Guides and participate in an intense case discussion of a real-world scenario. Afterward, each of the Guides will select one rising leader from the participants to mentor over the next 14 weeks. Those individuals selected will continue on, completing Acton’s online MyEJ program, developed around the Acton MBA curriculum, while their Guides provide insight and feedback.

Do you know a rising star in education innovation, energy, or real estate?

If so, send them to :

www.actonedinnovationchallenge.org

www.actonenergychallenge.org

www.actonrealestatechallenge.org

This week The National Review asked me to comment on the educational proposals President Obama is trying to push through. Here’s the gist of the article:

“Race to the Top” federal handouts, increasing Pell Grants, and executive-branch decrees won’t lower college tuition or improve the quality of university degrees …  [O]ver the next decade, many universities may bankrupt themselves by clinging to an educational approach that confuses lecturing with learning and protects highly paid, tenured faculties and administrators from a tsunami of technological change that soon will deliver transformational learning at a fraction of today’s costs.

Check out the article, where I go on to elaborate on some of the most fundamental problems in education:

1. A public that increasingly questions the value of a college degree.
2. High and rising fixed costs from tenured faculty, bloated administrative staffs, and expensive new buildings at a time when tenured-faculty teaching productivity is falling.
3. A tsunami of technologically enabled educational change promises to deliver transformational learning at a fraction of today’s costs

There’s something interesting happening when a professor—at a prestigious university no less—gives up his hard-won tenure to pursue an entrepreneurial opportunity in innovative education. But, as The Chronicle of Higher Education mentions in a recent piece, that’s exactly what one Stanford professor’s done :

And then this week, the Stanford University professor who garnered plenty of press attention when he taught an online artificial-intelligence course to more than 160,000 students last year, announced he had given up his tenured position to focus on his start-up, Udacity, which offers low-cost online courses.

This kind of move isn’t new, but with the constantly growing disruption happening in education, I think it will become more common. That is, I think tenure—long worth its weight in gold to academics—will, for a growing contingent, decrease in the value  traditionally placed on it.

Incidentally, the comments below this Chronicle article are, as is usual with stories of education disruption, a mix of reasonable diplomacy and foaming-at-the-mouth criticism. It’s funny how many critics attack merely the technology aspect of innovation and disruption, as if that’s the only thing anyone’s talking about or making strides in. They rebuke technology advancements as style without any substance. And, in some cases, this is true, but what can’t be ignored are more fundamental issues like this one, also from the Chronicle post (emphasis added):

[U]nless traditional colleges figure out a way to incorporate the new players and their ideas, such as MIT did recently, the innovators will figure out a way around the credentialing hurdle that will be acceptable to students, parents, and, most important, employers. And when they do, a part of the higher-ed market will be disrupted and rebuilt with students at the center.

Simply, in an environment where, as Pew recently reports, merely 54 percent of young adults 18–24 are employed—the lowest since 1948—stakeholders are demanding more from all of their institutions for learning. And they’re demanding it at both the university and K–12 level. The mode in which it’s purchased and delivered is a detail, albeit an important one. But what’s more important are solutions that work. 

These demands cannot and will not be met by technology alone, but they certainly won’t be met with a do-nothing or head-in-the-sand approach. Stakeholders will continue to demand new solutions, and for a few wise, enterprising academics, tenure might increasingly become a small price to pay to meet new demands and reap the personal fulfillment that comes with finding transformative solutions.

So, are you and President Obama now on the same page? In his State of the Union address and during a later speech at the University of Michigan, he more or less put universities on notice. Washington will pay attention to how well they spend money and how much they charge students.

That’s the first question from a Q&A I had last week with the Dallas Morning News’s “Education Front” blog. Suffice it to say, my short answer was “no”—cost efficiencies best come from the ground up (innovative, disruptive movements and technologies), not top-down federal mandates.

I was also asked by the Dallas Morning News:

• How would teaching methods lower tuition? And what examples do you have in mind?
• How would efficient teaching be measured? And how would you measure the “value” a professor adds to a student?
• What role should research play in a university’s life? (
• What do you plan to do next with your ideas, including those in the Seven Breakthrough Solutions?

Visit the post if you’re interesting in my answers to these questions, and also see this Transforming Education post, which addresses a few of these topics further.

Denis Saulnier—an education technologist and one of over fifty leaders in education who attended last fall’s summit on the future of business education—this week gave a breakdown of his experience at the event and had this to say:

Overall, an incredibly impressive—and more importantly, inspiring—event for those concerned with business education and education in general.

That’s great—most of us came away from the event feeling the same way, having deeply explored and debated some of the Big Questions presented in two case studies prepared for the event*:

1. What should be the end goal of business education?
2. What are the most pressing challenges facing traditional business schools, and do any of these really threaten the sustainability of the current models?
3. Does business curriculum or pedagogy need a serious overhaul? If so, what needs to be done?
4. Who is the most qualified to prepare graduates for productive and meaningful lives in business, and how should these teachers be recognized and rewarded?

Denis elaborates on some of the finer details of these questions in his post and goes on to write:

[I] really hope these [cases] are used in business and/or educational classrooms in the future. [I]t was a great way to frame and discuss these problems and do so in a way that “walked the talk” regarding experiential learning and business case-method pedagogy. 

*You can find the cases here: The Unsettled Future of Business Education and A New Frontier.

On The American Interest’s website, Walter Russell Mead writes this week:

In the humanities and most of the social “sciences”, the Ph.D and peer review machine as it now exists is a vastly expensive mediocrity factory.  It makes education both more expensive and less effective than it needs to be.  There are islands and even archipelagos of excellence in the sea of sludge but we needn’t subsidize the sea to preserve them.

Mead is commenting on a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education that highlights the critical eye increasingly cast on research efforts in academia. If you come here often, notions of the factory model of education and the glut of PhDs will sound very familiar.

Both Mead’s article and the Chronicle piece put into sharp relief the two biggest problems with the publish-or-perish model of academic tenure: (1) the perverse criteria for academic promotion that emphasizes the publication of work that the public doesn’t read and that even other scholars don’t cite, and (2) what this perversity costs to faculty, students, and the general public—both monetarily and otherwise.

Mead sums up the problem like this:

[O]ur current system encourages students to think that if you really love a subject, you should become a hack: a “serious” student of literature in our perverted world is someone who scribbles unreadable and unread treatises about minutiae rather than someone who takes that love into the public arena and encourages new generations to love, revere and, who knows, expand the literary heritage with which we are blessed.