Apart from health care costs, there’s almost nothing that goes up in this country like the cost of college. Up and up and up. Way faster than inflation. Families struggle to pay it. Students, graduates, struggle to pay it off. Last week in his State of the Union address, and in Ann Arbor, the President he’s going to do something about it.

Reward colleges that bring down costs. Punish those that don’t. There is all kinds of reaction to that, and a lot of thinking about how to change to rein in tuition.

This hour, On Point: Point of pain. Getting a grip on the cost of an American college education.

Guests

Henry Eyring, Advancement Vice President at BYU-Idaho, and author of The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out. You can find an excerpt from the book here.

Jeff Selingo, editorial director of the Chronicle of Higher Education, and author of the blog “The Next,” about innovation in higher education.

Nancy Zimpher, chancellor of the State University of New York, the largest higher education system in the country. She was one of a dozen higher education leaders to meet in December with President Obama at the White House to discuss ways to bring down the cost of higher education in America.

See the original article here.

Original article by Karin Wall for Innovation Management.

In their new book The Innovative University Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring explore why higher education is heading for disruption. As budget deficits and healthcare costs squeeze government support for higher education, enrollments at traditional institutions will steadily shrink. This will force the education sector to major changes and the students will come out winners, as is typical when disruption reshapes an industry. InnovationManagement asked the writers to elaborate on trends in higher education and the way education is delivered to students. Read the full article here.

Original article by Bill Fischer for Innovation Management.

Higher education is heading for disruption. In the new book The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education From the Inside Out, Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring explore why this is inevitable and what traditional universities and colleges can do about it. Professor Bill Fischer, himself an avid believer in disruption, reviews this book covering an extremely timely subject.

Disruption inevitably comes to all industries: some sooner and some later, but, in the end, there is no escaping the Grim Reaper of creative destruction. In just the last few years, no matter whether is was: photography, recorded music, book publishing, mobile phones, personal digital assistants, or postal services, what we have witnessed over and over again is that the venerated industry incumbents have proven to be dead men walking when it comes to their [in]ability to rise to the challenges of disruption. Read the full article here.

Here is an open letter to university administrators by Clayton M. Christensen, Kim B. Clark professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and Henry J. Eyring, advancement vice president at Brigham Young University-Idaho. They are co-authors of “The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out.”

These days it’s perplexing and painful to think about the future of traditional universities. How do we know what’s coming and how quickly it will come? How can we properly prepare for change without sacrificing the university’s best traditions?

In grappling with the uncertainty of the future, it helps to bear in mind four things that, in our heart of hearts, we really know:

1. Many of our current challenges are long-term and will, if anything, become more serious. These include the decline in federal and state support of higher education, the practical ceiling on tuition created by household income levels, and the advent of technology that fundamentally reshapes the teaching and learning processes.

2. The easy-to-make arguments don’t advance our cause. Two of the most tempting of these are the arguments that education is invaluable and that the for-profit sector needs tighter regulation. Policy makers accept these points, and they’re responding accordingly. But their efforts to regulate the for-profits and to preserve higher education funding in the face of health care and pension demands only remind them of the real elephant in the room, the growing per-student cost of higher education.

3. Whether we intend it or not, the university serves scholarship and scholars before students. Students at traditional universities get significant consideration, but it isn’t responding to their needs that makes these institutions expensive relative to for-profit universities and community colleges. The traditional summer break is a leading example of per-student costs being driven up by faculty preference. Another is the time and money spent in research, much of which adds little to the quality of student learning while raising its effective cost. The scholarly view of knowledge, though valuable in its realm, also creates an implicit cost to the majority of students: Because many courses and majors are designed primarily to prepare students for graduate study in the same field, students headed to professional school or directly in the workplace may finish college under-prepared.

4. Defending the status quo is futile, and it’s no fun. Given fiscal realities beyond the control of university administrators, defending the operational status quo means choosing between big, focused cuts or death by a thousand small ones. Trading up to a larger school offers no escape from the grisly task of doing less with less.

The situation in higher education is not without hope. In fact, our hope for 2012 and beyond can be bolstered by four other things we know:

1. The faculty members have good hearts and heads. Few people chose academic life with purely selfish thoughts, and the typical professor is at least as smart as the average corporate denizen. Resisting innovation and time spent with undergraduate students isn’t endemic to the faculty, it’s a natural response to the institutional systems to which they are subject, particularly publication-driven up-or-out tenure. Trapped within those systems and threatened with budget cuts, of course they’ll resist change. But it’s not for lack of inherent goodwill or ingenuity.

2. Young people will always want to go to college. Notwithstanding the power of online learning and social networking, campuses will continue to attract students as unique academic and social gathering places. (To be reminded of this truth, remember how excited we were to get out of the house at age 18 and how deeply interpersonal our most profound college learning experiences were.) Traditional universities might make the mistake of effectively closing their doors through tuition hikes, but there will always be young people who want to get in.

3. Technology and innovation make it possible to grow our way out of financial trouble and organizational resistance to change. In the purely brick-and-mortar, scholarship-driven university model, growing the student body means growing the operating deficit (absent unconscionably large class sizes). However, online learning allows for profitable growth. The financial surplus generated is just one benefit. The other is the growth of the student body, which decreases the need to cut under-enrolled programs and allows others to expand. Growth, with its prospect of new opportunities, fosters openness to innovation and change.

4. The future holds unimagined opportunities. Innovation, especially in the form of new technology, tends to worry even the best-educated and most-skilled workers. In fact, innovation often creates short-term disruption, and that is likely to be true of the innovations coming to higher education. However, the long march of innovation has produced more knowledge workers, not fewer, and it has made their jobs intellectually richer and more financially productive. That will be true of tomorrow’s university professors. Clinging to tradition will worsen individual and institutional disruption, while embracing innovation will hasten a new era of higher education productivity—not only of well-educated degree holders, but of new knowledge.

Original article by Donald Bobbitt

If you think about the university nowadays, we offer semesters based on agrarian calendars even though few to none of our students are actively engaged in farming. Our semesters and courses are designed in 15-week blocks of times. What’s so special about 15 weeks? Material is presented linearly. Which means if you miss a concept in a chemistry course, you’re in serious trouble come the final. Everything drives from the concept you missed. Because we’re working with 20 to upwards of 300 students in one class, we orient the material and the rate and everything we do in the classroom around the middle of the class. For those who are struggling, it’s very difficult to help get them up to the middle; those who’re bored are doing nothing when they could be doing more advanced work.

Much of what we do in higher education — from the way we teach to the administrative structure we use to carry out the mission — has been around for hundreds of years and perhaps even a thousand of years going back to the formation of Oxford and Cambridge. So the question then becomes, is that structure appropriate for the challenges facing higher education both within the state of Arkansas and indeed across the nation?

In his book “The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out,” Harvard professor Clayton Christensen examined business leaders a decade after they were at the top of their industry and found that most were at the middle of the pack and many were in bankruptcy. He found that leaders rarely got beat in head-to-head competition. Rather, a business came in at the bottom to offer a new product that was simpler, more affordable and allowed more people to participate. Christensen suggests that online education has the potential to be that sort of disruptive technology in the world of higher education.

Of course many people have already figured this out. The University of Phoenix enrolls 30,000 students per month. Last year, its revenues were $3.8 billion. Someone asked me recently, “What hope is there if Phoenix can do this?” Well, the University of Arkansas means something in the state of Arkansas. The brand means something; we just need to embrace the technology. In the future, I think our students are going to be fully online, fully taught using technology in the classroom or taught through a hybrid of the two, where technology is brought in to enhance the educational experience.

Online courses can be started at a variety of times and in a variety of formats. There’s no reason why a class couldn’t start on April 15 or Oct. 1. Students should be able to take classes parallel, the traditional way, or sequentially, where they’d concentrate on a topic for five weeks, learn it very deeply and then move on. For working adult learners, sequential is really an advantage. Over a year, the student gets the same number of credits, only in a different format. Alternative pricing structures might also be envisioned to address a variety of approaches.

We know a lot more about our students online than in the classroom. I can tell you how long a student spends on a particular module. I can tell you who read the material and how many times they went back over it. Because of the anonymity of the Internet, students are more likely to comment freely and contribute to discussions. Feedback to students can be immediate and constant. There are ways to build loops into the system, so that as individuals have problems they’re sent back to the appropriate section, where they review the material, develop competency and move on.

A lot of critics have suggested that some disciplines are not going to be amenable to online education. But about the time that someone says that, they’re proved wrong. A lot of people said an MBA could never be earned online. Then the London School of Economics and the University of North Carolina put their programs online. Some have suggested chemistry can’t be taught online — safely. But at Harvard there is a chemistry course for non-majors where you do all of your experiments in the kitchen. It’s the same experience; you just get to eat your experiments. They said you couldn’t teach biology. But it turns out that you can buy an attachment for your iPhone that turns it into a 10-power microscope.

The quality issue, which rears its head often, has been addressed recently in two reports, one from the Department of Education and one from the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. Both looked at online education and came to the same conclusion: There are some students who benefit from face to face instruction. If you can’t get out of the bed in the morning, you’re not going to turn on the computer and take your class. The role of mentors and the benefits of socialization are among other benefits. At the same time, other students benefit quite dramatically from the online experience because they’re time or space bound and can’t make it to the campus. Both reports concluded that for students who are properly motivated, the learning outcomes are identical between face-to-face and online education.

Donald Bobbitt is the University of Arkansas System President. The essay above was extracted and edited from a speech he delivered on Nov. 14 at the Clinton School for Public Service entitled “Innovate or Perish: The Challenges Facing Higher Education in the Next Decade,” which is available to watch in full in streaming video at arktimes.com/bobbittvideo. Bobbitt began serving as UA System president on Nov. 1.

As students grapple with the high costs of college, and universities work to cope with increasing demand, could a new model for higher education be on the way? Or is it already here?

Clay Christensen speaks with WGBH’s Kara Miller and weighs in on why a new model of higher education is needed. Listen here.

According to the American Physical Society, funding for science agencies could fall by as much as 11 percent. No less than Harvard, in its financial report for 2011, has warned of a likely “material adverse effect” on the university should government resources drop too much. “I’m a little bit afraid,” says Henry J. Eyring, co-author of the new book The Innovative University, “that building facilities for performing academic research right now may be a little bit like upsizing your home with a larger mortgage—in about 2007.”

The city’s response is that the new campus is a long-term investment, one that could generate 7,000 badly needed construction jobs in the short term and will take shape as a research enterprise over the next decade or two. “Science and technology are the future, and we hope the federal government will continue…read the full article here.

Traditional universities have been a cornerstone of society and culture for 1100 years. But economic, global, and organizational pressures are forcing universities to drastically change how they operate, or risk becoming obsolete. In today’s ultra-competitive environment how can university leaders improve and adapt an endangered system?

Henry J. Eyring is the co-author, along with Clayton Christensen, of  The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out. Eyring talks with On Teaching Online about how disruptive innovation, and the highly disruptive effects of online teaching and learning, can be applied to higher education.

Listen Here

Original Article by Mary Carmichael for Boston.com

Northeastern University is going south and west: It plans to open a regional campus in Charlotte, N.C., today and a similar outpost in Seattle within the year, with hopes of eventually planting flags in Austin, Minneapolis, the Silicon Valley area, and beyond.

The campuses will offer graduate degrees tailored to the workforce needs of local economies, with courses taught partly online and partly by Northeastern faculty flown in every few weeks. They will also help students work with local employers on research projects in an extension of the school’s signature co-op program.

The ambitious expansion comes as many other colleges are retrenching in response to economic hardship.

“Obviously there are risks associated with what Northeastern is doing,’’ said Henry Eyring, coauthor of “The Innovative University,’’ an influential book on new models for higher education. “But I think more institutions will go this way. If Northeastern gets out there quickly, it could have a lasting advantage.’’

Many universities have opened branch campuses either abroad or relatively close to their home bases; many also offer online courses. But few nonprofit colleges have combined both branch campuses and online courses across a broad geographic area.

Northeastern officials say they are making a safe bet because of several recent trends, including employers’ rising demand for workers with advanced credentials and colleges’ equally pressing need for fresh revenue. Improvements in technology also make online learning more engaging and effective than it used to be.

“This is a great time to look at new models, because a lot of the old models for higher education just aren’t going to be sustainable,’’ said Philly Mantella, the school’s senior vice president for enrollment management and student affairs.

Northeastern is making an initial investment of $60 million, with most of that going toward hiring professors. It is also increasing faculty ranks at home and has hired 261 new instructors out of a planned total of 300. Many of the new instructors will teach courses at the regional sites as well as the Boston campus.

The school has conducted two years’ worth of surveys of the cities it has chosen and believes there is high demand for Northeastern’s courses. Its president, Joseph Aoun, said the university could meet that demand at a relatively low cost. Graduate education and online classes can be delivered more cheaply than undergraduate education, in part because they do not require dormitories. Read More.

Original article by Kevin Kiley

Given the task of building a new university from the ground up, most traditional higher education leaders might enlist the help of faculty members, presidents of other universities, and members of the community.

John Ellis Price has a different team. The president of the University of North Texas System and CEO of the campus at Dallas, a 10-year-old campus that gained its independence from the system’s flagship in nearby Denton in 2009, has turned to a prominent management consulting firm, Bain & Company, primarily known for working with Fortune 500 companies.

The unconventional partnership is a reflection of Price’s unconventional goal. He’s not trying to emulate Ivy League institutions, the University of Texas at Austin, or even his university’s own flagship campus, which, like so many universities, has pursued a research-intensive path.

Instead, he wants to create a model of higher education that, he says, is more accessible, more flexible, and more student-focused. “The one thing at the forefront of everything we do is what can we do to drive down the cost of instruction and the time that it takes to complete a four-year degree while maintaining quality,” Price says.

Over the next year, Price and Bain will convene a group of 10 community, business and education leaders, known as the “21st Century Commission,” to help the university draft a strategic plan to grow from about 2,000 student to 16,000 by 2030. Judging by statements from Price, Bain consultants, and members of the commission, the plan is likely to include several ideas that have been discussed with increasing frequency by higher education reformers, such as an emphasis on online technology in education delivery, a restructuring of the traditional 15-week semester, and consideration of new ways of financing education.

The ideas thrown out by Price and the consultants at Bain have troubled faculty members when they were proposed at other universities, with professors arguing that such changes water down the educational experience, strip faculty of traditional rights, and place too much emphasis on what students want rather than giving them a well-rounded education.

But because UNT-Dallas is so young, and because the majority of the faculty are either assistant professors or lecturers, positions that do not come with tenure protection, public criticism of the commission has been minimal. Some faculty members have expressed concern about the direction of the institution, but they feel they have no latitude to stop the changes.

If UNT-Dallas ends up adopting these ideas, and if they prove successful, the university could influence how other institutions adapt to a changing higher education landscape. The initiative could also have ramifications for Bain, which has already shown interest in consulting with universities on administrative issues. Success in creating a new kind of university could drive other institutions to seek the firm’s assistance (or those of other firms) to delve further into university structure, including previously untouched areas such as academics, research and student life.

“We really are trying to figure out a model that can bend the curve on education costs pretty dramatically,” says Mark Gottfredson, a partner in Bain’s Dallas office, which will be working with the university.

Test Case

Price and Gottfredson say UNT-Dallas makes a good testing ground for new approaches. It is the first undergraduate public university situated within the city limits of Dallas. (Despite its name, the University of Texas at Dallas is located in a suburb, Richardson, Tex.) UNT-Dallas sits on a 264-acre campus in the south of the city, an area that has historically been underserved by higher education, local officials say. They believe demand exists in the area for a low-cost bachelor’s degree that can be flexible with nontraditional students’ schedules.

Since it began in 2000, the university has been growing at a rate of about 14 percent a year. When it reached 1,000 students in 2009, it became a full-fledged institution independent from UNT’s main campus. It now runs undergraduate and graduate programs in business, education, criminal justice and applied arts and sciences.

Price says he took his position in 2001 with the goal of creating a new model of higher education. “I had a strong belief back then, which is still a strong belief today, that current universities are outdated, outmoded and, in many cases, irrelevant,” he says. “I wanted to lead an effort to create a new paradigm for how a university in the 21st century could function, and I figured that if anyone had the chance of being successful it would be a new university, one that was created from the ground up.”

Until now, he says, the university has functioned under the accreditation of the main UNT campus, and Price hasn’t been able to put in place many of his goals. The institution is slated to receive its own accreditation in 2012, and Price wants to be ready to execute new ideas when that rolls around.

To be ready, he enlisted the services of Bain, which worked with Cornell University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008 and 2009 to improve administrative efficiency.

At UNT-Dallas, the firm will provide about $1 million worth of services at no charge. The firm regularly does pro bono work for nonprofit groups, though it charged Cornell, Berkeley and UNC. Berkeley, which paid the firm $7.5 million, was the only one of the three institutions to disclose how much it was paying. An anonymous donor funded the firm’s work at UNC for an undisclosed amount. Cornell, a private university, did not have to disclose its arrangement with the firm.

The firm’s work at UNT-Dallas is slightly different from what it has done at other institutions. UNT-Dallas is much smaller than the other universities. The work also centers on long-term planning, instead of institutional analysis.

Bain’s efforts at UNT-Dallas also represent a new foray for the firm, which was prohibited by the other institutions it worked with from looking at the academic core, focusing instead on administrative issues such as organizational structure, purchasing and information technology. Gottfredson says the firm’s role will not be to set an agenda but to support the commission as it determines the institution’s direction. Much of that work will be analyzing the feasibility of ideas.

He said he’s excited for the opportunity and the unconventional circumstances that Bain and UNT-Dallas get to work under. “It’s so rare that you get the chance to do something like this with a clean sheet of paper, when you’re not fighting tenured faculty, and you can make all the decisions about what the curriculum will look like, what the learning model will look like, and you get to decide what programs you’re going to put in place,” Gottfredson says. “It’s the opportunity to design something for the 21st century, a new model that encompasses the full scope and range of the university.”

While Gottfredson frames Bain’s work as a charitable endeavor, it could also open new doors for the firm. “While Bain is giving us consulting on a pro bono basis, this is also investment for them,” Price says. “When this project terminates in successful recommendations that are implemented, that’s going to result in more and more clientele asking them to look at other universities and make recommendations at those as well.”

While Price and the consultants have made it clear that low-cost, high-quality education is their goal, how they get there, and what that looks like, is up in the air. The commission will consider questions about all aspects of the university, such as how many buildings it will build and whether the campus should be residential or commuter, and questions about curriculum, such as which majors the university will offer, how much instruction will take place online, and how faculty hiring and promotion will be structured.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, now a candidate for the Republican nomination for president, has advocated for an undergraduate degree that costs no more than $10,000. Gottfredson says that number came up in the commission’s first meeting, but Price says that meeting the governor’s expectation is not his goal.

The composition of the committee gives some hints about its likely direction. One of its most notable members is Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor who recently published a book, The Innovative University, about forces in higher education, such as online communication, that will disrupt traditional models. Kim Clark, the president of BYU-Idaho, was also slated to be on the commission, but Henry J. Eyring, BYU-Idaho’s vice president for advancement and Christensen’s co-author, will be filling his seat while Clark recovers from a kidney transplant. BYU-Idaho, which has bucked convention on several issues, features prominently in the book and was featured by the American Council on Education at its annual meeting last spring.

UNT-Dallas faculty members will have a liaison to the committee to communicate ideas, but no representation on it. There are no tenured academics other than Christensen on the committee.

Eyring says the commission gives him a chance to discuss ideas he and Christensen developed while writing the book and see how they can be put in place at UNT-Dallas. “It’s fun to come in with a lot of theories and know that you have to apply theories to a unique setting,” he says.

Eyring thinks one of the most interesting questions the committee will tackle will be how the university develops physically and whether it invests in the amenities to become a residential campus. Given the cost of new construction, he says, the answer to that question could have ramifications for how the university finances everything else.

One of the major reasons BYU-Idaho has been successful at innovating is its ability to stay focused, Eyring says. He attributes that to a 21-sentence declaration by the president of the Mormon Church of exactly what the university would and wouldn’t do. He hopes the same type of focus emerges from the 21st-Century Commission. “Whatever the physical manifestation of this process ends up being, I hope that the community will be clear about what we do, and especially what we don’t do.”

UNT-Dallas has about 40 faculty members, most of whom don’t have tenure. For several years they operated on renewable one-year contracts. Some faculty members, who declined to speak on the record because they don’t have tenure, say they have been marginalized by the commission. They expressed concern about the direction of the institution and what might come out of the commission.

They worry that the institution’s educational quality may be compromised in the drive to provide a cheap degree, and that the target student demographic may not be informed enough to recognize the difference. They also worry that, because of the unique structure, faculty members won’t have the same protections they enjoy at other universities.

They don’t have a representative on the commission, they say, and they don’t trust the administration, consultants or committee members to look out for their interests.

Price insists that, for the most part, faculty members are on board with the institution’s direction. “The advantage I have is that I’m new, and when you’re new you get a chance to establish your culture,” he says. “The faculty and staff hired on here came with the knowledge that this was not going to be a traditional university. We’re going to be something different and distinct. The culture here is that we are a learner-centered university. We exist to serve the needs of the students.”