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This portrait of higher education shows how this enduring, resilient, and adaptable business model puts the customer -- the faculty -- at the center and drives out fear with academic freedom and tenure. Around the faculty, the other stakeholders -- administrators, students, and society -- form a business model that we can use as a point of reference. To understand how the model arrived at its shape, which illustrates its resiliency, we can look at how that model adapted to a series of pressures over the past 800 years.
Now comes the Internet. It is putting pressures on almost every business model, especially information services industries like higher education. Higher education will thrive in the Information Age. I also expect it to work differently than it does today.
To understand how the higher education community will adapt we can look at an important process in education -- pedagogy. It has two dominant models: the factory model and the apprentice model. The pressures that the Internet puts on these models are mostly threats for the factory model and opportunities for the apprentice model, just as they are in other information industries. The current rage for distance education will help the factory model scale until it is no longer formal education while a hybrid of computer-mediated communication supplementing the traditional face-to-face classroom will provide great opportunity for the apprentice model.
1) Education affects everyone and, after health care, takes the next largest share of our nation's resources. This analysis of U.S. higher education excludes:
primary
and secondary education (K - 12), which takes in $386 billion annually, 50% of
the total U.S. education and training revenue.
corporate
training ($66 billion; 8%)
an
individual's lifelong learning, both personal and professional, most of which is
informal and thus not part of the figures above.
2) sources
I got the above dollars and percentages from an article in The Industry Standard. Except where similarly noted, the statistics in this section <http://RicciStreet.net/port80/boardwalk/highered/> came from the Digest of Education Statistics, 1999.
Higher education is also called postsecondary education. It is a human services and information industry. The United States has roughly 4,000 such institutions depending on whether you separately count affiliated institutions like medical schools and system campuses. For example, within the SUNY system, is the University at Buffalo separate? Within UB, is the medical school separate?
The institutions come in four types according to the highest degrees they offer in a stepping-stone set: around 2,500 award associate degrees, 1,800 award bachelor's degrees, 1,400 award master's and professional degrees, and 504 award doctor's degrees.
Although public and private institutions have significant differences, the numbers here aggregate the two unless otherwise noted.
Three-quarters of Americans graduate from high school and almost all of them go on to some form of higher education. However, only about a quarter of U.S. adults over 25 have the status-enhancing credential of a bachelor's degree. Around eight percent have a master's, professional, or doctor's degree. Because the rewards are great, the sorting is severe; the pyramid is narrow at the top.
Plenty of learning goes on outside of higher education. Plenty of things are accomplished and fortunes made by people without college degrees, for example, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. Thus, it is even more important that higher education provide a sorting function for our meritocratic society: those who are smart and work hard are supposed to succeed.
Because knowledge is abstract and because college graduates will be working with information rather than things, they need credentials.
Institutions of higher education are in two not-for-profit businesses: they all award degrees and the top-tier research universities also provide research and development to industry and government.
In addition, institutions of higher education have two other important functions that are hard to measure or monetize. They inculcate values and they create and transmit knowledge.
The idea that higher education should be generously
supported from public funds, that the university should participate in the
creation as well as the transmission of knowledge, and that academic
institutions should at the same time be permitted a degree of autonomy was
behind much of the growth of universities in this century. ...
As expansion has taken place, it has been necessary to provide ever more
competitive sorting mechanisms to control access to high-prestige occupations.
The universities are also seen as meritocratic institutions that can be trusted
to provide fair and impartial tests to measure accomplishment honestly and
therefore, determine access.
source: American Higher Education In The Twenty-First Century
Is that final sentence true: fair and honestly?
The higher education industry has revenues in excess of $250
billion, about a third of the entire U.S. education and training industry.
$125 billion - 50% - government appropriations, grants, and subsidies (#1 on the right)
$62.5 billion - 25% - research sponsored by industry, including patent licensing and partnerships (#2)
$50 billion - 20% - tuition paid by students and employers (#3)
$12.5 billion - 5% - endowments and private sources (#4)
Notes:
At private colleges, tuition is a higher percentage and replaces almost non-existent state government support and sponsored research. That's why UB has lower tuition than Medaille, which is tuition-driven.
Led by Harvard and the University of Texas, institutional endowments total more than $100 billion. Sixty percent of the total belongs to fifty top-tier schools.
source: George F. Will, "The Education Bubble," Washington Post, March 31, 1997
These institutions categorize expenses as 1) maintenance, repair, and operation of the physical plant, 2) salaries and benefits to faculty and staff, 3) student aid, and 4) depreciation and interest.
Because they are not-for-profit organizations, they don't return shareholder value in the same way that for-profit organizations do. Higher education does return stakeholder value.
Why We
Must Change: The Research Evidence
by Lion F. Gardiner
(Click to download the article in Acrobat format.)
From Doug Madden's Summary of Gardiner's main points:
If students are not thinking during lectures, what are they doing?
Their attention drifts after only 10 to 20 minutes. They are listening, asking
or responding to questions, or taking notes only half of the time. Up to 15
percent of their time is spent fantasizing.
How much
course content do students retain? Studies sometimes find rare high values where
students retain 50 percent of the content a month or so after the final exam,
but values of 20 percent or less are common.
Numerous
studies demonstrate widespread cheating among students on classroom
tests, possibly involving 40 to 90 percent of all students. ... One-third of
students [in a national study of 6,165 respondents] with A's and B+'s cheated,
as did two-thirds of 6,000 students at 'highly selective' colleges.
The bibliography of Gardiner's article backs up these claims and refers to more empirical evidence.
Twelve-Step
Recovery Program for Professors Addicted to Lecturing
by Neil Davidson
University of Maryland
Dismantling
the Factory Model of Assessment
by Frank Serafini
Arizona State University
This “scientific” movement was predicated on three main concepts; (1) The School as Factory, (2) The Child as Product and (3) Standardized Testing as Quality Control. The child was thought of as a piece of raw material to be shaped by the educational “factory” into a quality “product”. Teaching became viewed as a form of training and schools were expected to operate more like assembly lines, working on children as they passed through various stages of the curriculum. Once these factories were “up and running”, and the standards for the “child as product” were determined, standardized testing became the means for measuring the quality of this product.
Bringing
the Real World Into the Classroom Through Internet Resources
by Claire Major and Valerie McCombs
Center for Problem Based Learning, Samford University
What is Problem-Based Learning?
Problem-based learning is a strategy for encouraging critical thinking and
problem solving skills along with content knowledge through the use of real
world situations or problems. Teachers act as facilitators, providing resources,
guidance, and instruction to learners as they develop content knowledge and
problem-solving skills. Students assume greater responsibility for their own
learning as teacher-directed instruction decreases. The teacher's role shifts
from that of instructor to guide, facilitator, and fellow learner. Problem-based
learning may take the form of group discussion of cases or problems and/or
projects designed and developed by students.
Learning
is initiated by a posed problem the learner is interested in solving.
Problems
are based on real-life, open-ended situations.
Projects
are open-ended, with many possibilities for design and development.
Students
are responsible for finding information necessary to solve problems.
Learning
is active, integrated, cumulative, and connected.
The
teacher's role is supportive, not directive.
Evaluations
emphasize integration of knowledge.
For some general background, try Learner-Centered Classrooms, Problem-Based Learning, and the Construction of Understanding and Meaning by Students.
Can project-based learning work in an M.B.A. program that bills itself as teaching "applied concepts and skills which support the exercise of leadership in a variety of settings"? Talk about it at the Bistro.
other pages in this Higher Education web
stakeholders | history
factory model | apprentice model
present and future pressures | distance education
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