Fareed Zakaria, TIME’s editor at large, opened the TIME
Summit on Higher Education on Thursday evening in New York City
by reminding his audience that “eight of our top 10 universities in the world
are American.”
Yet, America’s perch is not secure, he cautioned. Change is inevitable and
threats to the continued excellence of American higher education are very real,
from cuts in research funding to the rise of massive online open courses (MOOCs)
to increased global competition in science and technology.
So how do we keep our colleges and universities at the forefront of this
rapidly evolving landscape? Zakaria invited the summit’s first panel—Condoleezza
Rice, former U.S. Secretary of State and professor at Stanford University;
Norman Augustine, retired chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin; Mitch Daniels,
President of Purdue University; and John Holdren, Director of the White House
Office of Science and Technology—to lay out some of the critical issues in
education.
Zakaria launched the discussion by noting that up till now, the method of
university instruction hadn’t changed much since Aristotle. But with the advent
of low-cost or free MOOCs, we are ”achieving scale on an unimaginable level.
Hundreds of thousands of people able to take a single course but also
customization on a scale that’s unimaginable.”
And, businesses will adapt to the new technology and accept online classes as
qualifications for employees, said Norman Augustine. The name of the school
doesn’t matters as much as results. ”If you ask me what school most of my
colleagues went to, I don’t have the faintest idea. That question is what do
they contribute?”
He joked that though his answer might not be very popular among academics,
MOOCs could easily be the future. “The test will be, what do people learn and
what do they know,” he said.
Where does that leave the universities that are supplying the brain power
behind these online courses? Sure, lots of lecture classes can be taught online
and that could help cut the cost of a degree. But Condoleeza Rice pointed out
that video lectures can’t create the kind of environment that produces Silicon
Valley level innovation—for that, she said, students need to be in a classroom
with a professor.
“It’s an ecosystem,” said Rice. “It’s undergraduates, graduate students, in a
university that has a long history of encouraging faculty to do this work, and
then money, and then most importantly, people who are not afraid to fail.” She
believes that kind of environment is why Stanford has become a leading incubator
for innovation and startup ideas that “don’t stay within the walls of the
university. They make their way out to application and into the commercial
world.”
Mitch Daniels, former director of the Office of Management & Budget under
president George W. Bush, agrees. But given the resistance to the continual
increases in tuition, he said universities must show a high return on
investment. For Daniels, that means classes must pass what he calls the pajama
test: “What are we going to do at Purdue University so that 10 years from now
brilliant young people will choose to pick up from where they are and move [to
Purdue] for four years or more and spend a lot of money? What value are we going
to add, and how are we going to prove we’re adding value?”
For Daniels, that means creating a university that has lots of “hands on”
experiences hard to replicate from home. Those changes aren’t so easy to make:
Daniels likened it to an old neuroscientist joke: “How many psychiatrists does
it take to change a lightbulb. The answer is just one, but the bulb really has
to want the change. So that’s higher ed.”
Plus, maintaining our current model of education—where universities bring
basic research, applicable research and studies in the humanities all under one
roof—is extremely expensive to maintain, and tuition prices get higher and
higher as government funding drops. Daniels has frozen the tuition at Purdue
University for the next two years, but not all universities can do the same.
When Zakaria questioned whether the investment was really worth it, Holdren
responded with a resounding “yes”: “It may be an expensive model, but it works
extremely well. And the rate of return is extremely high.”
But where will that investment come from? How do universities manage
shrinking budgets and still do the basic research that is the underpinning of
the entire system? For more on the thorny questions of funding, check out
Friday’s live stream of the TIME Summit on Higher Education panel on the cost of
academic excellence at 9:10am,
Time
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