Transforming Education.

The Price of Prestige

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 15:11:00 -0400

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:

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.
Rapidly devaluing academic credentials place young people in enormous, non-dischargeable debt.
Teaching is subordinate to research of curious value, even though parents and taxpayers are told otherwise.
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.

Taking Entrepreneurial Education Further

Wed, 16 May 2012 20:37:00 -0400

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:

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.
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.

In the News: Toppling Towers, the Demotion of Prestige, and a Sensitive Question

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:41:00 -0400

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.

In addition to a swipe about “old-school alumni who have gotten too cozy in their club chairs,” the WSJ recently chimed in on the growth of Kahn Academy, developments in ex-Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity experiments, and the launch of TEDed. Some “glitches” in this sea change are mentioned, including a online dropout rates, complaints from users about speed, and issues surrounding accreditation. But I’d say that it won’t be long before speed is a non-issue. I think the other two “glitches,” though, are interrelated: dropping out is easier if you think that third parties (like employers) don’t value educational experiences that aren’t officially accredited. How to change that is the big question.
The “Do professors work hard enough?” question is obviously a sensitive one, but recently the Washington Post asked it anyway. It’s sensitive because there are clearly plenty of incredibly gifted teachers for whom the answer to that question would be a very loud Yes. It’s necessary to ask anyway because there’d be some for whom the answer would be No, and because the tuition and fees to attend traditional universities continue to rise—alongside a debt now at $1 trillion—while the quality of education continues to stagnate and decline.
“[A] prudent strategy favors accumulating real accomplishments — revenues earned, clients transformed, or lives changed — in spite of any affiliations you may have.” HBR wasn’t writing of education exclusively, but, in any case, it’s rather provocative coming from inside one of the most traditionally prestigious institutions in the world. The article highlights the kinds of platforms—like Codeacademy and Kaggle—that may eventually outpace diplomas as markers of legitimate qualification.

More on the Quality-of-Learning Gap

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 23:09:05 -0400

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.

The Acton Education Innovation Challenge

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 15:52:46 -0400

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:

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.
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

The National Review: Federal largesse can't prop up doomed business model forever

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:49:15 -0500

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:

A public that increasingly questions the value of a college degree.
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.
A tsunami of technologically enabled educational change promises to deliver transformational learning at a fraction of today’s costs

The Changing Value of Tenure

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:16:00 -0500

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.

5 Questions from the Dallas Morning News

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:42:00 -0500

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.

Feedback on the Business Education Summit

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:43:04 -0500

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*:

What should be the end goal of business education?
What are the most pressing challenges facing traditional business schools, and do any of these really threaten the sustainability of the current models?
Does business curriculum or pedagogy need a serious overhaul? If so, what needs to be done?
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.

Is the End of Publish-or-Perish Near?

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 15:36:29 -0500

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.

A Summit on the Future of Business Education

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:57:00 -0500

In my experience, university faculty typically fall into two camps: (1) teachers who care deeply about their students, and (2) political types who care more about their own prestige. Sadly, the professors most often featured in the press come mostly from the political group—teachers are too busy teaching to waste time on political spin.

In September, we were blessed to gather at Acton a roomful of educational and business leaders of the first type—teachers and leaders who care about students—to have a serious discussion about future challenges and opportunities in business education.

Over fifty business educators and entrepreneurs from Harvard, Rice, the University of Texas at Austin, Baylor, and more than a dozen other universities from around the country came to discuss the following questions:

What should be the end goal of business education?
What were the most pressing challenges facing traditional business schools, and did any of these really threaten the sustainability of the current models?
Did business curriculum or pedagogy need a serious overhaul? If so, what needed to be done?
Who was most qualified to prepare graduates for productive and meaningful lives in business, and how should these teachers be recognized and rewarded?

Here are the two cases discussed at the event: The Unsettled Future of Business Education and A New Frontier.

UPDATE: Video of conference participants.

Transformational Education in Action: Children's Business Fair

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 13:44:49 -0400

What do you get when give kids the chance to

Make something with his or her own hands;
Sell it (safely) to a stranger; and
Experience the freedom (and responsibility) of having a little extra spending money as a reward?

I call these three things the “3 Magic Seeds of Entrepreneurship” (pdf). And we plant those seeds each fall at the Children’s Business Fair (CBF) in Austin, TX.

It’s continued to grow every year since we first put in on. This year there were over 88 separate booths, where kids ages 6 to 13 sold everything from arts and crafts to food to “messages in a bottle.” And turnout—1,200 attendees—broke the record.

But I think one of the biggest benefits of CBF from an learning perspective is that it clearly helps to answer one of the four big questions of education: “How can I prove what I can do?” These enterprising boys and girls spend weeks, sometimes months, building and preparing their product or service, and then test what they’ve got in front of a live audience. And whether they “win” at the fair or not, they persist—many budding entrepreneurs at CBF come back year after year.

That’s the kind of thing most adults don’t have the courage to do.

And by providing children with a forum to showcase their entrepreneurial creativity, CBF—and all organizations and events of its kind—help kids advance from what education innovator Clark Aldrich calls the “to know” part of learning, firmly into the “to do” part, and onward to the “to be” part.

Check out this video from last year’s CBF to see what it’s all about; read further about the fair here, here, and here; and visit www.childrensbusinessfair.org to learn more about how your son or daughter can get involved.

Godin on Modern "Factory" Education

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:18:00 -0400

Seth Godin asks the right question about modern education in a recent blog post:

As we get ready for the 93rd year of universal public education, here’s the question every parent and taxpayer needs to wrestle with: Are we going to applaud, push or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable, testable and mediocre factory-workers?

Bingo. Of course, if you’ve read Transforming Education enough, this notion of the “factory” model of education should ring a bell.

The last time I checked, Godin’s blog post had gotten “liked” almost 8,000 times on Facebook and retweeted almost 1,500 times. It’s Godin, so no huge surprise there. But what’s important is that more thought leaders like Godin spread this idea around, because it’s a real issue affecting the futures of millions of students, parents, taxpayers, and teachers. Many are resistant to substantial, fundamental changes in education—that’s why people like Godin, who’ve built such large followings, are essential to the cause.

But here’s something else to spread: new schools are adapting.

[Image via]

New Models for Status Quo Universities

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 17:38:39 -0400

Is it possible to create a new type of public university, where professors and administrators make clear promises to their students and deliver an exceptional education at a reasonable cost?

It’s not only possible, it’s a reality at the University of Minnesota–Rochester, where Chancellor Stephen Lehmkuhle has shown that a results-oriented approach to education can help graduates lead more meaningful and productive lives at a fraction of the cost of a traditional university.

Another extraordinarily successful results-oriented model is the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, a school that since its founding in 2002 has become one of the best undergraduate engineering schools in America.

Like the University of Minnesota-Rochester, the Olin College of Engineering has eliminated academic departments and makes “learning how to learn” as important for faculty and students as delivering technical skills:

“How can you possibly provide everything they need in their knapsack of education to sustain them in their 40-year career?” [Olin President Richard] Miller asked. “I think those days are over. Learning the skill of how to learn is more important than trying to fill every possible cup of knowledge in every possible discipline.”

Kevin Carey, author of the Washington Monthly article on the University of Minnesota–Rochester and policy director of Education Sector, an independent think tank in Washington, D.C., recently wrote another piece in the left-of-center magazine The New Republic titled (improbably enough) “Rick Perry is a Higher Education Visionary. Really.”

By setting politics aside in the article—quite rightly—Carey makes a strong case that reforming higher education is really a battle between forces defending the status quo of university bureaucracies and those seeking more student-centered institutions.

Institutions like the University of Minnesota-Rochester and the Olin College of Engineering are just a few of the new results-oriented models that promise far better results to students, parents, taxpayers, and, yes, even hard-working teachers and researchers who care about advancing the lives of students and the frontiers of knowledge.

A Salute to Great Teachers

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 18:36:42 -0400

Do you remember a special teacher or coach who changed your life? Me too. Extraordinary teachers quite literally change the world because of the students they inspire.

That’s why, a few years ago, our Acton Foundation put out a call to entrepreneurial students all over the country to help us identify extraordinary teachers.

The response was impressive, and we ultimately invited over thirty gifted teachers from all across America, whom we gathered to honor in Austin. Some of the honored guests included

Bill Petty of Baylor University
Brad Hancock of Texas Christian University
Al Napier of Rice University
Jim Nolen of the University of Texas at Austin
Steve Ives of the University of Oklahoma
Jon York of Ohio State

There may be many approaches to building a world-class university, but every one of them will involve finding, equipping, and inspiring great teachers, so they can touch the lives of even more students.

Who are the world-class, life-changing teachers you know? Be sure to mention them in the comments.

Praising Excellence in Higher Education

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 11:20:00 -0400

One of the great joys of being a teacher is getting the chance to work with other teachers who change the lives of students.

Just this week I came across the great work that Brad Hancock is doing as the Director of the Neeley Entrepreneurship Center at Texas Christian University, especially with regard to helping students answer the questions “Who am I?” and “Why am I here?” in its Values and Ventures program. You can find out more about the program in the short video here:

As part of our Life of Meaning course at the Acton School of Business, each student chooses ten people whom they believe are role models and they interview them for at least two hours each, to ask about their triumphs and regrets and lessons they wished they’d known earlier. Three of these interviews are to be people between the student’s age and forty years old, at least three between forty and sixty, and at least three of the role models must be sixty or older.

Here’s what was astonishing. After hundreds of these interviews, we realized that most people over sixty, if you listen closely enough, say the same thing—that at the end of life only three questions will matter:

Have I contributed something meaningful?
Was I a good person?
Who did I love, and who loved me?

By the end of a life well lived, satisfaction and fulfillment won’t be about money or fame or power, but about the answers to those three simple questions.

Hat’s off to Brad and his colleagues at TCU for working so hard to inspire and equip their students for true heroes’ journeys.

Improving Higher Education in Texas

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 13:10:36 -0400

It’s time for the debate about reforming higher education in Texas to move past disparaging professors or demonizing reformers, so we can capitalize on ways to improve the learning and research at our Texas universities.

The cost of a college degree is too high, and our graduates are not as well prepared for productive and meaningful lives as they should be. It seems everyone agrees on this. Plus, our universities should be producing world-changing research in the sciences, humanities, and elsewhere.

The problem is that our universities have become too complex and unwieldy, with complicated missions, bloated administrative costs, and limited effectiveness. If you read Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring’s recently released The Innovative University, which traces the DNA of modern academia, you’ll see how several hundred years of well-intended efforts—with unintended consequences—have left us with a bureaucratic higher-education system that is in dire need of reform.

Christensen and Eyring are serious and respectful in tone, but make it clear that a tsunami of change is sweeping across higher education. It is a wave of economic disruption that means extraordinary opportunities for universities that embrace far-reaching changes, and grave risks for those who do not.

The lack of teaching and research productivity in today’s universities is not the fault of professors and administrators, who are merely reacting to perverse incentives. But those incentives can be changed in a way that will allow our Texas universities to improve the quality of a college education; reduce costs and increase access; and focus and strengthen research in the sciences, humanities, and other disciplines.

Improving the Quality of Education

I believe that education has four jobs, or questions that it should help a student answer:

Who am I and why am I here?
What skills do I need and which skill should I master?
Who will affirm me and hold me accountable?
How can I prove what I can do?

If these are the right deliverables, our universities are failing. First, we have removed the question of values almost entirely from an undergraduate education. Second, employers and graduates alike complain that we are not delivering 21st century skills, much less helping students discover which skills they are specially equipped for. Third, grade inflation and a lack of results-based management have failed to hold students accountable, and surveys suggest that students feel increasingly distant from teachers. And finally, a college degree shows little proof of what an individual graduate can contribute to the world.

If you closely examine the undergraduate classroom of 2011, you will see far too many teachers with poor to mediocre pedagogy. Professors are too frequently lecturing from PowerPoint slides, an ineffective way to deliver skills or help students find their purpose in life. It is time to start attracting and rewarding a new generation of course designers—many from outside academia—who can create transformational courses and inspire teachers to deliver them in a cost-effective way.

The following four changes would greatly improve the quality of undergraduate teaching:

Offer campus-wide courses to inspire students to ask the “Who am I?” and “Why am I here?” questions, so as many as possible leave college pursuing a purposeful and productive life, full of meaning.
Make explicit promises to deliver the skills that graduates need in each major and begin to take student and employer satisfaction seriously. Recognize and reward teachers who can create and deliver courses that deliver on these promises.
Take steps to curb grade inflation and provide students with mentors or coaches who can provide accountability and affirmation.
Introduce portfolios of a student’s work that showcase skills, highlight passions, and provide proof of what a graduate can do.

Nothing is as important as improving the quality of a college education. While a cheap, ineffective education is better than an expensive, ineffective one, simply reducing costs is not a path to preparing our next generation for productive and meaningful lives.

If our universities shift to a results-based culture, and reward teachers for creating innovative courses and delivering on explicit promises to students, the quality of a college education will improve dramatically.

Reducing Cost and Increasing Access

Our universities have become increasingly complex bureaucracies, with complicated missions and poor measurement systems. As a result, the cost of an undergraduate education has soared.

To put it bluntly, the bureaucracy is spending more energy on protecting and reproducing the professoriate than it is teaching undergraduates. Too many resources are being poured into too many PhD programs that produce graduates who can no longer find jobs in academia, because tenure-track positions are being replaced by low-paid adjuncts and teaching assistants.

And far too many highly paid professors are teaching far too few students, when there is no proof that small classes, in and of themselves, deliver superior learning.

The table below compares the 1,000 Most Productive Teachers and 1,000 Least Productive Teachers out of 4,000 teachers at the University of Texas at Austin. Productivity is based on the cost per student per class taught, after subtracting from a teacher’s compensation the external research funds contributed by a teacher.

This table is not meant to disparage anyone, as the relative performance is largely a result of the incentives built into the current system. Nevertheless, the Most Productive 1,000 Teachers are paid one third as much for teaching five times as many students. In other words, the Most Productive 1,000 Teachers are seventeen times more productive than the Least Productive 1,000 Teachers.

The issue is not that poorly paid adjuncts are teaching large classes—the 220 students per year taught by the average productive teacher is the equivalent of four classes per semester of 37 students each. The real problem is that highly paid professors are teaching such small classes—on average 6.9 students per class, and only 44 students a year .

To put this productivity gap into perspective, an undergraduate degree delivered solely by the least productive teachers would cost $406,381, while a degree delivered solely by the most productive teachers would cost less than $12,000.

To bring the cost of a college degree to a level that most Texans can afford, we must do the following:

Design high-quality blended classes (online plus face-to-face) that can deliver learning in basic courses for less than $100 per student, far more effectively than a classroom-based lecture delivered from PowerPoint slides.
Use improved course designs and incentives for tenured, tenure-track, and adjunct faculty to increase the average class size for most teachers, to well above 7 students a class, while increasing the amount of learning delivered.
Copy schools like BYU-Idaho that have gone to a year-round, three-semester schedule, with more fully utilized facilities, so that the number of students can be increased to lower the fixed costs per degree.

With a better delivery system and more fully utilized facilities, current tuition rates can be slashed and more students served, while increasing the quality of the learning delivered.

Strengthening and Focusing Research

Academic research is important for the reputation of top universities. One of the most important criteria to be considered a Tier One school is the amount of external research funding granted to a university.

At the University of Texas at Austin, 10% of the faculty—approximately 400 out of 4,000 individual teachers—bring in over 90% of the external research funding. If Texas universities want to attract more external research funding, we need to put incentives in place to greatly increase the small number of highly productive research faculty who are bringing hundreds of millions of dollars in external research funds to our universities.

Changing the incentives to reward scientific research faculty would attract world-class researchers from all across the world, particularly at a time when many universities are facing cutbacks.

Much of our university research in Texas is internally funded—meaning it is subsidized by tuition and taxpayer money. Research in the humanities and other areas that are not financed by external research funds can be critical to advancing civilization. But currently there are massive internal subsidies without any transparent way to measure costs or prioritize research.

A budget that sets limits on subsidies from taxpayers and tuition and a transparent system that sets priorities need to be high priorities, particularly since polls suggest that such research is not a high priority for Texas taxpayers, students, or parents.

A Call to Action

A tsunami of disruptive change is coming to higher education. This presents a tremendous opportunity for our Texas universities to create a 21st century model for higher education. We simply must reinvent our Texas universities to improve the quality of education; reduce costs and increase access; and focus and strengthen research.

The citizens of Texas believe that preparing students for productive and meaningful lives should be the top priority for our public universities. In our major research universities, we also need to increase externally funded research so our universities move higher in the academic rankings. Important internally funded research in the humanities and other areas should be prioritized and funded too.

All of this makes it critical that disparaging professors or educational reformers is a political pastime that we cannot afford. Nor can we tolerate leaders in higher education who make vague promises or stonewall fundamental reforms. The status quo simply is no longer an option.

A shift to a results-based culture in our Texas universities is the best way to deliver on promises to graduates and taxpayers and leapfrog more prestigious universities in the rankings. It’s time to recognize and reward our best teachers and researchers, and attract more talented faculty to Texas from all over the globe.

The Innovative University: Clay Christensen's Reasoned Approach

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 10:36:21 -0400

Often the rhetoric concerning higher education reform is so heated that it becomes unhealthy. After all, there’s a lot of money riding on the outcome.

But for those who want a thoughtful, reasoned—even gentle—approach to the extraordinary opportunities (and massive problems) facing higher education, there’s Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring’s new book, The Innovative University.

I’ve had the honor of knowing Clay—one of the finest business minds since Peter Drucker—through serving on various Harvard Business School committees and boards for the last sixteen years. Clay’s simply one the finest, most inspiring people I’ve ever known, as both a scholar and a human being. I’ve only known of Henry Eyring through his work with former Harvard Dean and now BYU-Idaho President Kim Clark. But what I do know is that both Henry and Kim are extraordinary leaders, and have worked wonders at BYU-I.

The Innovative University is beautifully written, and based on Clay’s work on disruptive innovation. Any serious follower of the modern university who reads this book will realize that the status quo is in deep trouble.

Sadly, I predict that few traditional universities will be bold enough to seize the opportunities Clay and Henry describe. The incumbents in an industry usually cling to their failing paradigm all the way to collapse, a tragedy described years ago by my former professor (and the world’s best Socratic teacher) Ben Shapiro in Why Bad things Happen to Good Companies.

My guess is that academia will face an even darker future than other disrupted industries, simply because of its governance problems. It’s as if US Steel, when trying to respond to the disruptive threat of mini-mills, not only had to face its unions, but had to contend with management at all levels elected by the unions—just as the tenured faculty effectively elect its Department Heads, Deans, and Presidents.

Khan Academy and the Coming Tsunami

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 16:33:08 -0400

Those of us lucky enough to be on the front lines of education innovation see new advances in technology and pedagogy on an almost daily basis.

Just look at Kahn Academy, which is helping a 10-year-old learn advanced trigonometry, as this excellent in-depth Wired profile of the company shows.

Some critics dismiss Khan as just another “lecture and drill” tool. But this is missing the point. It’s an engaging “lecture and drill” approach that keeps students interested. One commenter on the Wired article captures it:

It doesn’t feel like a lecture. It’s like having my co-worker explain something in a restaurant, scribbling on napkins and all over the table.

Plus, Kahn tests as it goes, and allows you to move at your own pace. And it’s free.

Khan is now considering moving beyond adaptive, skill-based software for math and other “hard skills” and into other, more collaborative tools that will allow students to work on their writing skills by reviewing and commenting on each other’s work. (Something similar to what we’ve been doing at the Acton School of Business with independent, internet-based writing tutors for some time.)

We’ve worked with Khan at Acton Academy elementary for the last year or so, and our fifteen-year-old daughter is currently using it in math, chemistry, and physics to prepare for her second year of high school.

Kahn is terrific, but innovation in this area is moving so quickly that we are simultaneously using several adaptive math programs at the elementary school. Depending on the student, Manga High and JiJi Math are even more powerful than Khan.

But the greatest power from adaptive skill-based software comes when you introduce real-world projects that allow students to apply their new-found skills hands-on. When students believe that they are on a quest, and that their mission requires overcoming a series of real-world challenges, it’s amazing how quickly they can learn. Last time we tested, our Acton Academy students were 3.5 grade levels above age and accelerating—and these standardized tests only measure a small fraction of the learning that’s taking place.

Rather than break projects into discrete subjects like Math, English, Science, and History, we group them into seasonal adventures with titles like Entrepreneurship, Make and Create, and the Hero’s Journey, each of which lasts several months and has a major performance at the end.

The entire year has an overarching question attached to it that ties all the seasonal quests together. This year the overarching question will be: “Does absolute power corrupt absolutely?”

In Science, the children will tackle projects focused around how man has harnessed the power of nature to do work, from converting the calories that come from eating vegetables to human power, all the way to mining and refining uranium to create nuclear energy, with a special focus this year on chemistry experiments. In History, students will ask why some civilizations rise and others fall, debating whether ideological, military, economic, or political power are more important. In all subject areas, students explore the stories of individual heroes, asking which of the heroes exhibits a life closest to their own personal life’s “calling.”

All of this will culminate in the spring with a play written and performed by the children, exploring how character is formed, and whether absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Can elementary aged children, all together in the same one-room schoolhouse, really tackle problems like this? Absolutely. Often with more insight than the high-powered MBAs at the Acton School of Business. And we’ll be seeing it more and more in the coming educational tsunami.

Surplus Truck Windshields, Surplus PhDs, and the Misguided Mission of Today’s Universities

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 14:33:14 -0400

While working in Russia in the 1990s, I saw factory after factory continuing to produce products that no one wanted. I have one particularly vivid memory of a small town outside of Nizhny Novgorod, where thousands of unneeded truck windshields had been piled into a ravine to make a rickety bridge for automobiles.

The truck itself was no longer being produced, but the windshield factory chugged along, destroying value with each unit made. Such is the fate of bureaucracies that lose sight of those they once promised to serve.

Today, surplus PhDs are the truck windshields of higher education. PhDs were once needed to supply an ever-growing professoriate in the 1960s and 70s, but today a PhD is a lonely bridge to nowhere for many recently minted academics.

Surplus PhDs are a symptom of a far deeper problem in today’s universities: that they have become self-perpetuating bureaucracies, where administrators and a political professoriate care more about protecting their own power than serving students.

The debate over teaching or research happening in Texas today is merely a public-relations sideshow. If you want to understand the cancer that threatens our universities, tally the thousands of tenured faculty who do little productive work; wade through mountains of frivolous academic research articles; and take a closer look at the millions paid to administrators. All symptoms of a bureaucracy that has lost its way.

To be clear: there are many dedicated tenured and non-tenured teachers inside our universities who care deeply about their students. And there is a cadre of talented researchers who are working to cure diseases, invent new technologies, and delve deeply into the mysteries of humanity.

But increasingly these heroes are at risk of being smothered by an antiquated bureaucracy that continues to churn out second-rate PhDs that few—both inside and outside the academy—want to hire. This is where the main energy of today’s university is focused and its soul is being lost.

And pity the newly minted PhD. Many cannot find a tenure-track position, in part because those positions are collapsing under the weight of a modern university system designed from the inside out to protect and perpetuate itself. “The interests of academics and universities on the one hand and PhD students on the other,” The Economist deadpans, “are not well aligned.” Now that’s an understatement.

Here’s how the modern PhD factory works:

Highly paid administrators and the political professoriate keep the public’s attention focused on protecting a false sense of prestige, measured by the perceived strengths of its departments’ PhD programs. These doctoral programs require a feedstock of graduate students willing to “publish or perish.”
This results in a glut of scholarly articles published—a 550% increase in the last five decades (p. 2, here)—and a deluge of PhDs awarded, many in increasingly exotic sub-subfields. The vast majority of them don’t turn into tenure-track professorships within any reasonable time period.
Meanwhile, thousands of graduate students—many of them lured by a well-cultivated image of “academic life” and convinced they’ll beat the odds—keep feeding the PhD factory. This works perfect for the universities, who have “discovered that PhD students are cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour.”

And, for many graduate students, that’s where the fun stops. What many find is what the ivory tower tries to conceal: a confusing, needlessly backbreaking system of tenure and promotion based almost solely on burgeoning publication requirements, a system that the Modern Language Association urges universities to “work vigorously against” (p. 14, here).

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with wanting to get a PhD for one’s own intellectual growth, as long as you don’t expect students and taxpayers to subsidize the bill. But the mission of the academy should be about serving others—first preparing students for meaningful and productive lives, and then, where worthwhile, producing discoveries that add value to everyone’s lives.

Here’s the sad truth: undergraduate education has become the Potemkin Village of the university—no longer its main mission but a façade designed to keep tuition and taxpayer subsidies flowing. Most of the professoriate now see undergraduate teaching as an irksome task to be farmed out to poorly paid adjuncts and teaching assistants. And few professors focus on innovative course creation, which means that much of undergraduate teaching consists of little more than lecturing off of PowerPoint slides.

Real scientific research is celebrated in glossy brochures, another ruse to keep wealthy donors writing checks. (Fancy stadium suites and a winning football team help too.) Educrats and PR departments speak of the importance of combining teaching and research, but they refer to expensive graduate seminars where tenured faculty focus more on low-value academic journal articles and replicating the professoriate than inspirational teaching.

Ultimately, the ruse is no more sustainable than the Russian windshield factory. The economics of the PhD factory are beginning to collapse as subsidies from taxpayers fail to keep pace with the rising salaries of tenured professors and administrators. Today 75 percent of new faculty hires are non-tenured positions, because the cost of a political professoriate who neither teach nor do sponsored research has become untenable.

A dearth of new tenure-track positions means that 80 percent of PhDs in many fields will never find the hallowed academic position they seek. Many will become low-paid adjuncts, the equivalent of the Russian bridge to nowhere.

Yet the PhD factory keeps chugging along.

The Soviet Union appeared to be the most powerful nation on earth, but it was rotten to the core, because its real workers were slaves to an aristocracy of power-hungry bureaucrats. Look closely at the PhD factory and you will see eerie parallels: a system near collapse, supported only by subsidies from unwitting students, parents, and taxpayers.

With just a little sunshine and a few changes in incentives, expect the productive teachers and researchers to rise up in revolution and create a university for the 21st century. That will be a liberating day for all involved.