TITLE: Unique in Exactly the Same Way AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: June 10, 2013 2:41 PM DESC: ----- BODY: Ah, the idyllic setting of my youth:
When people refer to "higher education" in this country, they are talking about two systems. One is élite. It's made up of selective schools that people can apply to -- schools like Harvard, and also like U.C. Santa Cruz, Northeastern, Penn State, and Kenyon. All these institutions turn most applicants away, and all pursue a common, if vague, notion of what universities are meant to strive for. When colleges appear in movies, they are verdant, tree-draped quadrangles set amid Georgian or Gothic (or Georgian-Gothic) buildings. When brochures from these schools arrive in the mail, they often look the same. Chances are, you'll find a Byronic young man reading "Cartesian Meditations" on a bench beneath an elm tree, or perhaps his romantic cousin, the New England boy of fall, a tousle-haired chap with a knapsack slung back on one shoulder. He is walking with a lovely, earnest young woman who apparently likes scarves, and probably Shelley. They are smiling. Everyone is smiling. The professors, who are wearing friendly, Rick Moranis-style glasses, smile, though they're hard at work at a large table with an eager student, sharing a splayed book and gesturing as if weighing two big, wholesome orbs of fruit. Universities are special places, we believe: gardens where chosen people escape their normal lives to cultivate the Life of the Mind.
I went to a less selective school than the ones mentioned here, but the vague ideal of higher education was the same. I recognized myself, vaguely, in the passage about the tousle-haired chap with a knapsack, though on a Midwestern campus. I certainly pined after a few lovely, earnest young women with a fondness for scarves and the Romantic poets in my day. These days, I have become the friendly, glasses-wearing, always-smiling prof in the recruiting photo. The descriptions of movie scenes and brochures, scarves and Shelley and approachable professors, reminded me most of something my daughter told me as she waded through recruiting literature from so many schools a few years ago, "Every school is unique, dad, in exactly the same way." When the high school juniors see through the marketing facade of your pitch, you are in trouble. That unique-in-the-same-way character of colleges and university pitches is a symptom of what lies at the heart of the coming "disruption" of what we all think of as higher education. The traditional ways for a school to distinguish itself from its peers, and even from schools it thinks of as lesser rivals, are becoming less effective. I originally wrote "disappearing", but they are now ubiquitous, as every school paints the same picture, stresses the same positive attributes, and tries not to talk too much about the negatives they and their peers face. Too many schools chasing too few tuition-paying customers accelerates the process. Trying to protect the ideal of higher education is a noble effort now being conducted in the face of a rapidly changing landscape. However, the next sentence of the recent New Yorker article Laptop U, from which the passage quoted above comes, reminds us:
But that is not the kind of higher education most Americans know. ...
It is the other sort of higher education that will likely be the more important battleground on which the higher ed is disrupted by technology. We are certainly beginning to have such conversations at my school, and we are starting to hear rumblings from outside. My college's dean and our new university president recently visited the Fortune 100 titan that dominates local industry. One of the executives there gave them several documents they've been reading there, including "Laptop U" and the IPPR report mentioned in it, "An Avalanche is Coming: Higher Education and the Revolution Ahead". It's comforting to know your industry partners value you enough to want to help you survive a coming revolution. It's also hard to ignore the revolution when your partners begin to take for granted that it will happen. -----