Its Time for a Revolution in Higher Education! Don’t let the Market Win!

I have been developing a blog post in my head for about two or three days about the need for revolution in Higher Education. Unfortunately, I still need a day or two more, but the market always wins. Colleen sent me this very interesting blog post this morning. Read it here.

Fighting Against the Market

The blog gives a very plausible direction for the future of higher education, namely academic and corporate partnerships streamlined for students. As the author discussed, this will drive the price of higher education down and at the same time centralize education to a few top schools, such as an MIT/amazon partnership.

Why should a family pay for an extremely costly liberal arts education when there are streamlined options that are cheaper and faster? In selecting colleges, students are increasingly interested in the final outcomes of the education – often choosing programs based on highly competitive pre-professional programs, such as automatic entry into medical school. The students don’t care about the benefit of the liberal arts education, they just want to be a dentist or to be able to work at Google. Don’t believe me, talk to almost any student taking a difficult general education course.

If nothing is done, the market wins! This isn’t that bad of thing of course. Education will become more affordable. Universities will be more efficient. As likely one of the “ringers”, I could even benefit. (HaHaHa – I am an asshole and I love it.)

These kinds of national programs will be easy to access but ultimately highly competitive, giving the edge to those students who are already prepared for it. Students arriving to college with a disadvantage for any number of reasons will lose big time (underrepresented students, poorly educated students, students with a learning disability, slow learners, etc).

And of course if you are in a two year accelerated course you are going to be deciding your lifetime career at 18 years old in a very short amount of time – I can’t tell you how many musicians I have meet who were forced to major into science because of a parent and vise versa. It sometimes takes these students a year or two to figure these things out.

Solving the Problem…

Universities think slow and are very conservative. This might be okay for an institution like Princeton or NYU (the author’s university) but at smaller schools we need to be aggressive and innovate. Here’s the thing about innovation, it’s risky. Some things will fail. But if we do nothing, it will collapse. We need to get lean and tailor liberal arts to our students.

Innovative!

Two examples of just awesome university innovations are:

• The amazing turn around at Paul Quinn College. Building the university into the community. Amazing! (I am still in shock that I was on a panel with Michael Sorrell – that guy was amazing.)
• Many universities placing a universal focus on undergraduate research for their students.

Campus innovators have to be let loose and not bogged down in the usual piles and piles of red tape. This is change that is needed now. Small liberal arts schools are at condition red! Yes, some things will fail. But some things will win BIG TIME.

We must also become lean

Here are some things that must change over night:

• Faculty and staff that do more, should be paid more. Faculty and staff that do less, should get paid less.
• Research at most small liberal arts schools should be focused on student involvement. There is no reason why a student attending a school such as Fordham should be funding a faculty member (through their $53K yearly tuition) to study rocks or classical music unless they are directly benefiting.
• Faculty need to be community driven.
• Tenure and other promotions need to be based on how successful a professor is at reaching students in the classroom, in research, and in the community – of course unless they can fund their activities with a grant. FORGET about how good they are a research in their field (unless it directly relates to students). Note: I am talking about small liberal art universities without Ph.D. programs.
• It is not summer vacation, it is a time to do research with students.
• We need to be lean. We cannot have university employees take advantage of being at a cushy job. All Hands on Deck!

Why Fight?

Truth is dying in the world. It’s so hard to keep track of what is real and what isn’t. I feel like I want to go back to the old days when ‘1984’ seemed like an impossible, ridiculous world that could never happen. The way we beat this is by educating our population. WE NEED LIBERAL ARTS! If we are not trained to think critically then we will believe a government that lies to us. And of course there will be many folks left behind by the new meritocracy.