Innovation — Everyone Says It’s the Answer, but Is It What Colleges Need?

You can always chide higher education by referring to innovation in the sector. Or, rather, the supposed lack of it. The criticism should be familiar: Paradoxically, in an industry full of thoughtful people, the imaginative ideas are strangled by dull leadership and organizational bureaucracy.

That swipe is at the top of an article on higher education’s “16 most innovative people” in the current issue of Washington Monthly. And it was embedded in some of the opening remarks in a panel at New America on Thursday, based on the Washington Monthly article and featuring three of the innovators it described. They each got a chance to talk about what innovation is for, where it comes from within an organization, how you can measure its success — and, hey, what’s higher ed’s problem, anyway?

Actually, the panelists pointed out, it might not be entirely colleges’ problem. Too many of the incentives around higher education, they said, focus on inputs — more applicants, more students, the time those students spend in class — rather than outcomes, like graduation rates or the jobs students get after college. And that focus applies to the innovation conversation as well.

“The pressure to be innovative is actually the pressure to be new, rather than the pressure to effect change,” said Charles L. Isbell Jr., a professor and senior associate dean in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. A college can get grant money for trotting out something that looks interesting and new, yet is totally ineffective, he said, but it won’t get money if it borrows successful techniques from other colleges.

Mr. Isbell was joined on the panel by Bridget Burns, executive director of a consortium of public colleges known as the University Innovation Alliance, and Amy Laitinen, director of higher-education policy at New America. Paul Glastris, editor in chief of Washington Monthly, moderated the panel, while Jamie P. Merisotis, president and chief executive of the Lumina Foundation, provided some additional comments.

There is no doubt that higher education is, in many ways, a hidebound and bureaucratic industry, but some of those processes are tied up in the notion of giving students a rigorous experience. One of the great dilemmas in innovation, Ms. Laitinen said, is how colleges and federal programs can provide flexibility for students without encouraging fraud and abuse.

“There is the threat that higher education stays the same, and it doesn’t help the students who need the change,” she said, “and there is the threat that higher education will change, and it hurts the students it needs to help the most.”

“We need to rethink our concept of innovation,” Ms. Laitinen said. “We can’t afford to keep thinking that you are for innovation or you are for consumer protection. And, at least in D.C., those are too often the camps that people put themselves in.”

A Question of Emphasis

The push for “innovation” in higher education is somewhat problematic to begin with. The term itself sets up an ideal for new and groundbreaking initiatives. Yet much of higher education needs some basic blocking and tackling, says Kent John Chabotar, a former president of Guilford College and an expert on college finance. At many colleges, the ratio of students to faculty and staff members is unsustainable, for example, or the course offerings are not in line with what’s in demand, or the debt or deferred maintenance is out of control. Those things need to be resolved before a college thinks about innovation.

And, he says, much of what is touted as innovative is more tactical than strategic. When he talks to people about what they are doing to change their business practices, “there’s an overexaggeration of what they consider ‘innovation’ — things like changing the curriculum or increasing or decreasing the class size.”

The Washington Monthly article highlighted a number of projects that help students get through college to graduation, like Georgia State University’s use of analytics to identify struggling students and give them guidance.

In a commercial setting, that might seem kind of a low bar. “Customers” who are paying for a “product” would expect services that deliver what they paid for. But in higher education, it’s not seen as a way to improve service but a philosophical argument: Where’s the line between helping students and letting them off the hook?

What’s more, “innovation” is kind of problematic for higher education in another way: It’s an out for policy makers who don’t support the enterprise at the levels it needs to do its job. Higher education has endured cut after cut over decades. The answer to dealing with those cuts has often been to “innovate.”

At the panel at New America, an audience member who has been both a tenured professor and an adjunct in her career pointed out that college administrators, in their push for innovation, too often ignore the plight of those instructors. In a dialogue about reform, she said, that issue can’t be ignored.

“There is a broader question that we need to focus on,” Ms. Burns responded, “which is that higher education has an unsustainable funding model, and what you’re seeing are decisions being made to get by.”

“The infighting gives the illusion of progress,” she added, “but when we pit people against each other, which is faculty versus student versus staff versus administrator versus president, we’re missing the big picture here, which is the sector. Instead of focusing on institution by institution, we need to get together and solve these problems on a much more global level.”

Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.