Entering into a new calendar year affords an opportunity to reflect on higher education – our shared practice, mission, and passion. Such reflection occupied a good deal of my time during the recent holiday break.
For me, it’s a process. It’s richly informed by my PASSHE experiences and engagements with other universities, colleges, and entities operating in and around higher education. Inputs also include the research reports, articles, and books I consume voraciously when my schedule permits.
To my surprise, I kept bumping up against “disruptive innovation” – a concept I thought had diminished its hold over the “higher ed imagination.” Harvard’s Clayton Christensen developed disruptive innovation decades ago in
(1997). It characterizes how small-scale participants in an existing market can compete effectively with large-scale players – even overturn their hold over the marketplace – by introducing new technologies or approaches that give them reach into underserved markets. In
(2011), Christensen applied the concept to higher education. He argued that online learning would enable new higher ed providers to challenge existing ones by serving student markets at lower cost and by reaching into new markets. As a result of disruptive innovation, Christensen believed that many higher education institutions would ultimately close.
Christensen was only partly correct. Online learning has changed higher education fundamentally as it has become part of the very fabric at many institutions. When done well and by design, its acceptance by students, faculty, and administrators as a viable, quality means of instructional delivery has grown consistently since 2002, when Babson College started measuring such things. Unsurprisingly, use of online modalities grew consistently, with growth acceleration during and after the pandemic.
Enrollments at large-scale online institutions show no signs of receding, while the footprint of online learning at more traditionally oriented universities and colleges also continues to expand. But online learning has not proven to be the disruptive innovation that Christensen predicted it would be. Yes, there has been a steady uptick in the number of college closures, but nothing that yet heralds the more massive movement he expected. As a consequence, discussion about disruptive innovation in higher education moved onto a back burner a few years ago.
So why did I keep bumping into it over the holiday? Why do I enter the new year wondering whether it is back now with a vengeance, and likely with more staying power? I haven’t nailed that down yet, so here’s a “drafty” best guess.
(2023), Michael D. Smith argues that the advance of online learning was necessary but insufficient to disrupt the higher education industry (obviously). It significantly expanded the reach of education providers. Still, it did not undermine their monopoly hold over postsecondary education and the awarding of degrees and credentials that employers use as proxies for the competencies they seek in their hires. Smith asks what happens:
- When employers engage in skills-based hiring and look for real (rather than proxy) assessments of people’s competencies, whether through examinations used as part of the hiring process and/or with reference to skills-aligned non-degree credentials?
- When the market for skills-aligned non-degree credentials explodes and includes new actors such as Google and LinkedIn, whose tremendous reach and name recognition reduce to almost nothing the marginal cost of each new credential they produce, and the marketing required to get a student to enroll in the credentialing course or pathway?
Smith isn’t speculating about things that might happen. He is speaking directly to trends that are gaining significant traction right now. A 2023
survey of 800 employers found that 55 percent had eliminated degree requirements for some job positions in 2024 and 45 percent planned to do so in 2024.
Some topics Smith does not address directly are also germane.
The confidence that Americans have in higher education is slipping. Buckle your seatbelts. A 2023 report by Gallup leads with this: “Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen to 36%, sharply lower than in two prior readings in 2015 (57%) and 2018 (48%).” Confidence is weaker among self-identified Republicans than among Democrats, but the differences are trivial. Americans’ confidence in higher education is not a partisan issue.
I have addressed this phenomenon before and put it down to a combination of factors. For example, the rising price of higher education puts it out of reach for low- and middle-income individuals, many of whom are disappointed, even angry, and feeling left behind in an economy that increasingly and in gross disproportion benefits the rich. (Arlie Russell Hochschild’s 2016 work
Strangers in Their Land is brilliant on this last point.)
Another factor contributing to waning public trust is that higher education issues are getting swept up more frequently in the rough-and-tumble of partisan contests. As a result, higher ed’s reputation has suffered from attacks coming from both left and right along the political spectrum. And it doesn’t appear to matter that those attacks glom onto issues that are highly localized to a specific region of the country or a particular small corner of our vastly diverse industry. We are all painted with the same brush in the public’s mind. We are all Harvard. We are all New College. We are all Michigan State. We are all Missouri.
Recent developments have only exacerbated these confidence-busting and politically polarizing tendencies.
Research by economists Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman shows how ruthlessly efficient elite universities are at reproducing privilege in this country. It’s been raising eyebrows among higher education insiders for some time, with occasional play being made with the content in the media (for example, in
this article in Forbes). And it has served as background to attacks, again from both left and right, on higher education with respect to its diffidence, irrelevance, and elitism. Reactions to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s ensuing response — whatever you think of them — dumped a boatload of fuel on those burning embers.
I haven’t even touched on artificial intelligence, which already is rocking our world and will continue to do so in ways we cannot even begin to imagine. But for those interested in a little foray, have a look at ChatGPT’s response to the prompt I gave it earlier today: “What is disruption theory and how does it apply to higher education?”
I could go on, but I won’t because I want to get to the countervailing argument that I made with myself as I kept bumping into disruptive innovation. (And yes, I admit that Chancellor Dan does not require an audience to engage in the Socratic method, even though the method, by definition, appears to require one.)
My countervailing argument is based on my experience at PASSHE. More precisely, it is based on you, on the work you do in support of our students, in support of our mission as an engine of workforce development, social mobility, and a more civil, tolerant, and generous society. That work is tremendously impactful. It changes lives, saves some, and lifts up whole communities. It counters at every level the skepticism, cynicism, anger, and distrust swirling around higher education, amplifying potential for the industry’s disruption.
Our work – your work – is not performed in service to the one percent. The work is performed as per our birthright – for all Pennsylvanians. And you are damned good at what you do, by any measure. I’m partial to measures showing us how students who enroll from households in the lowest income quintile earn about as much 10 years after graduating as those from higher income quintiles. I’m partial to measures that show when we layer race/ethnicity onto that equation, we get a comparable result. Are there gaps in student outcomes? Yes, there are, particularly with regard to student persistence and graduation rates. They are large and unacceptable, and they exist between black/brown and white students, between wealthy and less wealthy students, and between rural and urban students. At the same time, we are dedicated to attacking these gaps and making progress – not swiftly enough for any of us, I know, but we are making progress, nonetheless.
We have a great deal more to do. But let us be clear, that report refers as much to our energy, dedication, and even innovation in these areas as it does to the scale of the hill that remains for us to climb.
Our work – your work – is closely aligned with employers’ needs. It is career-aligned. It always has been. We were born as teachers’ colleges, for goodness’ sake, and last I checked, teaching is a career. Obviously, the world has moved on, and the communities we serve require a great deal more than teachers. They need – and we produce – healthcare workers, business professionals, engineers and scientists, designers, artists, librarians, and more. They need, and we produce, people who can think creatively, communicate effectively, and work collaboratively as part of teams – skills that our graduates master in part because our programs are grounded in a general education that fosters those skills.
We don’t sit idly by, clinging to past accomplishments as the labor market changes. No. We evolve our programs continuously, because we are the people’s universities operating in service to all of Pennsylvania. You can track that evolution at the university level – I do – and see how changes in university degree programs reflect employers’ changing needs in the regions we serve.
And we continue to respond as employer needs continue to change. Employers we serve are increasingly turning to skills-based hiring. In response, many of our universities are integrating career-aligned non-degree credentials into their degree programs. Some are making such credentials available to non-degree students. The level of innovation is high, it is inspiring, and it is proceeding apace.
East Stroudsburg University is doing great using badges to acknowledge students who master employer-defined skills in specific areas of business, teaching, and sports science. Kutztown University is working with Coursera, through which students will have access to as many as 300 employer-recognized credentials they can pursue at no cost to themselves, thereby increasing their viability in the labor market. Through our partnership with Grow with Google – a partnership launched only last fall – our universities have enrolled nearly 700 students (350 of them unique learners) in courses that lead directly to high-demand credentials.
Our work – your work – is responsive to students’ ever-changing needs. I am acutely aware, as you are, of the challenges our students face, the pressures they are under, the level and breadth of anxiety they deal with as they navigate their lives, our universities, and their careers. Everything we see in the research literature speaks to the importance of highly personalized forms of student engagement – engagement tailored to a student’s specific needs whether performed online, face to face, or in some hybrid modality.
This work is awfully hard to do, especially as we engage more students from underserved markets. The increasing diversification of our student body and our program offerings defies a one-size-fits-all delivery model. And here, too, we’re pretty damned good – you’re pretty damned good. In the past several months, I’ve visited with faculty who are engaging students in research projects that are meaningful societally and tremendously powerful as opportunities for individual growth.
I’ve spoken with colleagues at Indiana University of Pennsylvania who are engaging proactively in a holistic approach to student success, ensuring that every student has access to a human navigator who can connect them with the resources they need to succeed in their very individualized educational journeys. (“Success coaches” and other related terms are used at other of our universities also pursuing this path.) I am inspired by the work our colleagues at PennWest Clarion are doing with the using a novel approach to “emergency aid” – an approach that helps students in need have instant access to the dollars they need to keep them from stopping out.
Our work – your work – is supported with hard-earned dollars received from students and from Pennsylvania taxpayers. Accordingly, and respectfully, you undertake that work with careful stewardship. Here too you have excelled, though the work has been especially challenging. In 2019, our universities adopted a standard budgeting process to get a more accurate picture of our financial circumstances. Initial results became available in Fall 2019 and showed six of our (then) 14 universities were spending beyond their means and dipping routinely into reserves to balance budgets. One of the six had exhausted its reserves and was relying on the others for extensive cross subsidy; four others were headed rapidly in that direction. Worse, the data showed the System careening toward a $160 million structural deficit that, if left unaddressed, would have exhausted our scarce reserves by 2027.
Today, structural deficits of that proportional magnitude are all too commonplace in higher education. They are showing up in like Arizona, California, West Virginia, and at other universities in Pennsylvania, just to name a few. In some ways, PASSHE was fortunate to have identified its deficit sooner rather than later, and to have acted swiftly to address it.
Four years later and because of your hard work, the System is more financially stable. That work has been rewarded by the General Assembly, which approved unprecedented back-to-back increases in state appropriations totaling 22%, as well as significant one-time investments including funds for unmanageable legacy debt burden. And the work was rewarded more recently by the credit rating agency, Moody’s, which raised PASSHE’s credit outlook from negative to stable. Students have benefited directly too. They have not seen a tuition increase for six years and are beginning to benefit from expanded investment in student financial aid and student services, the impacts of which are beginning to show up now routinely in improved enrollment and retention trends.
This is cause for celebration. Yet it is too soon to let down our guard. All of our universities are recovering, but several remain in a weakened state. As such, they are particularly sensitive to exogenous shocks of even the smallest magnitude — fall enrollments or state appropriations that come in even slightly below expectations, or sudden and unmanageable cost increases, for example. The bipartisan political coalition that came together and is essential to continued relatively high levels of state support also requires our constant careful attention and nurturing. Should it fracture, then PASSHE’s state appropriations will fall back into the pattern of neglect that characterized the 2010s, or worse. We need to proceed together with caution and care.
Lastly, the work – your work – is constantly looking for new constructs that enable us to fulfill our mission while taking account of the very challenging demographic, financial, and political circumstances in which we find ourselves. Colleagues at Commonwealth University and PennWest are fundamentally re-thinking educational, business, and administrative approaches so all students, irrespective of campus location, have access to the broadest possible range of academic programs and student supports.
Their stories are beginning to appear, and they should be written, told, and seriously studied. The work involved in blending departments, aligning campus policies and practices, building whole new program arrays and course scheduling protocols is, well, more than heroic. And it has been done in ways that are smart as well as effective.
As another example of innovation, colleagues at Cheyney are implementing a model that promises to sustain the university into the future, utilizing a range of creative partnerships to do so. Their progress is significant, and it is grossly under-recognized, including by those in regulatory and accrediting circles. (Note: Before the break, Board of Governors Chair Cynthia Shapira and I drafted
a letter to the university community expressing our admiration for their work and offering our support in solidarity.)
Like many others across our System, these are stories of grit, determination, creativity, and purpose. They testify to our evolution as a public higher education system, our public-mindedness, and to the qualities that should be recognized as fundamental to public higher education. They testify – you testify – to our power and our promise. And it is on that note that I enter this new year.
Wishing each and every one of you a happy and healthy 2024. I look forward to seeing you on campus.
