Wake Up, Colleges and Universities
In my latest Business Week column I call for higher ed transformation.
Colleges and universities are some of the world’s most important assets. We need these institutions to enable citizens to be passionate, lifelong learners and doers. We need them to help advance the world’s thought capital and catalyze the translation of ideas into solutions. We need them to produce innovators who can solve the big social problems we face related to issues of health care and energy.
Unfortunately, post-secondary education in the U.S. is stuck in the 20th century with an Industrial Era business model that is both worn at the edges and unsustainable.
Only 40% of the U.S. adult population earns a college degree. That may have been fine when an industrial economy supplied good jobs to those without post-secondary education. It’s not fine today. We need a larger percentage of the U.S. adult population to be able to earn that education at a price they can afford. Instead, the price of higher education is out of reach for many, and financial aid models are stretched to their breaking point.
Very interesting piece. The problem is however broader than you’ve described and as old as the current educational system. It is simply an issue of reward. The professors are rewarded with research grants only when they “invent”, while the students are rewarded with grades when they “re-invent” the professor’s thoughts thereby forming a very vicious cycle that has only been reinforced with time. This has become extremely dangerous because it is not easily detected (we’ve created students who can only advance knowledge - who can make the wheels of the earth run faster, but cannot change it’s direction). An example I always use to explain the state of our educational system is the question “will we produce a 21st century Albert Einstein?” Anybody who has given any thought to this question should be scared of the obvious answer. For the record, I do not believe Albert Einstein was produced by the educational system of his day (it’s probably still the same as today), but the society in which he lived in did. That society is long gone for we now live in an era where speed has trumped up depth. The absence of such society has created the need for our educational system to evolve to address this imbalance.