Encyclopedias, newspapers, and record labels have a lot in common. They all are in the business of producing content. They recruit, manage, and compensate capable producers. Their products are composed of atoms — books, papers, CDs, DVDs — and are costly to create and distribute. Their products are proprietary, and they take legal action against those who infringe their intellectual property. Because they create unique value, their customers pay them, and they have revenue. Their business is possible because of scarcity: quality news, information, knowledge, learning, art.
Yet today the businesses of encyclopedias, newspapers, and record labels are in various stages of collapse. They all have lost their monopolies on the creation and delivery of content. They are being decimated by the digital age that brought abundance, mass participation, the democratization of production, the rise of new digital delivery channels, the infeasibility of old notions of intellectual property, and completely new business models — all enabled by the Internet. The allegedly unassailable attributes of their age-old businesses have been erased faster than you can tap “delete” on your iPhone.
Come to think of it, encyclopedias, newspapers, and record labels are a lot like colleges and universities as well. For fifteen years, we’ve been arguing that the digital revolution will challenge many fundamental aspects of the university.1 We have not been alone. In 1997, none other than Peter Drucker predicted that big university campuses would be “relics” within thirty years.
Flash forward to today, and you’d be reasonable to think that we have been quite wrong. College and university attendance is at an all-time high. The number of students enrolling in degree-granting institutions rose more than 118 percent from 1969-70 to 2005-6, while the percentage of 25- to 29-year-old Americans with a college degree rose from 16.4 to 28.4 in this same time.3 The competition to get into the greatest universities has never been fiercer. Campuses are thriving, and attendance at college football games is holding strong. At first blush, the university seems to be in greater demand than ever.
Yet there are troubling indicators that the picture is not so rosy. And we’re not talking just about the university endowment reductions caused by the current financial meltdown. A dismal 58 percent of entering freshmen actually graduate from the same college within six years.4 More and more students are questioning the “bang for the buck” as college tuition has risen in cost more than any other good or service since 1990, leaving students with $714 billion in outstanding student-loan debt in the United States alone.5 Students around the world are increasingly choosing alternative models of higher education. In 2007, nearly 20 percent of college students in the United States — some 3.9 million — took an online course, according to the Sloan Consortium, and their numbers are increasing. The University of Phoenix now enrolls more than 200,000 annually.6 Annual enrollment in the University of Phoenix online MBA program is 16,000,7 compared with 900 at Harvard. Given the huge explosion in MBA courses offered online, many of which are from Asia, it’s a fair guess to say that most MBA degrees today are taken online. Yet the proportion of institutions declaring that online education is critical to their long-term strategy has actually declined.8 There are more subtle indicators as well. Students and faculty alike are refusing to pay for academic periodicals and are file-swapping like it’s 1999.9 For many of the smartest students, it’s fashionable to try to get an A without going to any lectures — meaning that the cream of the crop is beginning to boycott the basic model of pedagogy.
Universities are losing their grip on higher learning as the Internet is, inexorably, becoming the dominant infrastructure for knowledge — both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people — and as a new generation of students requires a very different model of higher education. Many people have written about this topic, in EDUCAUSE Review and other publications. The transformation of the university is not just a good idea. It is an imperative, and evidence is mounting that the consequences of further delay may be dire.
Now is also a time of great opportunity, and there is a steady stream of proposals for change. Some say the web enables distance learning and the elimination of campuses. Others argue that we need more technology in higher education or that colleges should be opened up and be made free to all. There are renewed calls to abolish tenure and even to replace traditional departments with a new set of problem-focused disciplines.10
The trouble is that most of the ideas being bantered about don’t address the fundamental problems with the university or show a way forward. Rather, change is required in two vast and interwoven domains that permeate the deep structures and operating model of the university: (1) the value created for the main customers of the university (the students); and (2) the model of production for how that value is created. First we need to toss out the old industrial model of pedagogy (how learning is accomplished) and replace it with a new model called collaborative learning. Second we need an entirely new modus operandi for how the subject matter, course materials, texts, written and spoken word, and other media (the content of higher education) are created.
We believe that if the university opens up and embraces collaborative learning and collaborative knowledge production, it has a chance of surviving and even thriving in the networked, global economy.
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