Looking Under Light Poles

The time seems ripe for some organization or individuals to assemble disparate and seemingly unrelated parts and redefine education in the process. For the moment let’s not argue the feasibility of such dramatic institutional change. Let’s ask another question: where would you look to find early examples of such change?

My concern is with higher education, although frankly I no longer see higher education as distinct from education at other levels. For me all education has been subsumed into something I simply call learning. But for the purposes of making this posting more manageable, I’ll confine it to higher education … and to higher education in the United States.

Where, then, could we look to find organizations with nascent strategies that call to question the business of higher education? Research institutes generate many innovative ideas, but I’m looking for something farther along than incubation. I want to find organizations that are, for right or wrong, being judged by markets. It doesn’t matter to me how wonderful the idea or concept. If it can’t survive in the market, then it doesn’t have the potential for significant institutional and social change that I seek.

In the United States currently, we have an unprecedented situation where many private colleges and universities and even some public ones have priced themselves precariously. My guess is that the most innovative efforts to redefine higher education will occur in the cauldron of low-cost competitors. Many low-cost institutions will merely choose to skim profits made available by the exposure of higher-priced colleges and universities. But low-cost alternatives could actually be a major factor in rethinking what we do in higher education.

I’m now reading a very fun book written by Carlota Perez, titled Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages. In the book, Perez examines five technological revolutions that occurred in the last two hundred years. In each case, she found that the “socio-institutional framework” lagged by several decades the changes in technology and the economy, but that the full potential of the changes was not realized until social and institutional changes also occurred. The techno-economic transformations that unfold bring “a major shift in the relative price structure that guides economic agents toward the intensive use of the more powerful new inputs and technologies,” and this seems to ripple through the socio-institutional spheres and find expression.

It’s easy to argue that the full potential of current information technologies will not be reached until industries like higher education recreate themselves, presumably along dimensions consistent with the lower cost advantages of the new technologies and their economic consonances.

With that as background, I set about trying to locate colleges and universities with innovative business models that include a low-cost strategy. Here is the pdf that describes this preliminary research (figures are on pages 1 and 2, discussion is on page 3). The work describes summary findings from 3,899 U.S. private colleges and universities using publicly available data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Systems (IPEDS). The research uses instruction-related expenses per FTE during the 2004-05 academic year as a means of identifying low-cost institutions.

As shown in the document, there are low-cost outliers (77 total) among the eight categories of institutions considered in this research. Most, perhaps all, of the low-cost institutions will prove on further examination to be uninteresting. Certainly a substantial number will be one-year anomalies (e.g., data reporting problems) and can easily be dismissed.

But I’m only looking for the one or two examples that are not anomalies and not profit-skimmers, but rather are re-imagining higher education. I do have to say, however, that with this study I feel a bit like the man searching on the ground under a light pole, at night, for a lost item. When asked where he lost the item, he replied “over there.” When asked why, then, he was looking over here, he said “the light is better here.” Certainly the light is better with the IPEDS universe of existing colleges and universities.

It may very well be that searching the murky fringes of the existing world of higher education will uncover the energy, creativity, innovations, and attention to social impact that I seek. But for a start, I’m content to look under the lamp. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Originally posted 25-February-2008 by Gary M. Lewis on http://garymlewis.typepad.com/educational_imaginations.

Permalink: http://garymlewis.com/instchg/2008/04/25/looking-under-light-poles/