Last fall, Winona State University opened a 90,000-square-foot Integrated Wellness Complex on the east side of the campus, just across the street from the university’s performing-arts center. The complex houses classroom and administrative space along with aerobics facilities, weight rooms, a glass atrium, and a 200-meter indoor track. Massage therapy is available on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. It cost $19.5-million to build.
It might seem strange, or even cruel, to blame a perfectly benign building at a perfectly respectable university in Minnesota for the coming demise of higher education as we know it. To understand why it is nonetheless true, you have to consider where Winona State started and why it became what it is today.
The institution was founded in 1858 as a “normal school,” the 19th-century term for colleges that trained public-school teachers. In 1921 it began offering bachelor’s degrees and was renamed Winona State Teachers College. As the population of college-going students exploded after World War II, Minnesota converted Winona into a bigger, broader institution, dubbing it Winona State College in 1957. The final upgrade came in 1975, in a trade of “College” for “University.”
There are more than 150 former normal schools like Winona, educating hundreds of thousands of students nationwide. Nearly all followed an identical progression: They became teachers colleges, then dropped the “teachers,” then dropped the “college.” Usually, they are medium-size, relatively obscure, and located away from central metropolitan areas. That’s why directions on how to get there are often embedded in their name—Northern Iowa, Eastern Michigan, University of Maine at Presque Isle, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. Most of the rest, like Winona, are stamped with the reassuring label of “State.”
Why did almost every institution do exactly the same thing in exactly the same way? Because we have only one way of thinking about higher-education excellence in this country. We are all entranced by visions of the academic city-state, the palace of learning on the hill. That’s where the administrators and faculty who populated the former normal schools came from, and where they wanted to return. If their alma mater wouldn’t have them, a copy would do.
So today Winona State has five separate colleges: liberal arts, education, business, science and engineering, and nursing and health sciences. Those are further subdivided into scores of academic departments—18 in the college of liberal arts alone, with stalwarts such as English, philosophy, and political science joined by newer disciplines like women’s studies and mass communications (the latter being distinguished from communications studies, which has a department of its own).
Segregating faculty into autonomous, noncooperating departments, each with chairs and accompanying administrative expenses, makes a fair amount of sense for institutions designed to conduct research. But Winona State isn’t a research university. Over 93 percent of its students are undergraduates. It granted four doctorates, all in nursing science, last year.
Yet once the form is decided upon, organizations inevitably grow to meet its shape, academically and otherwise. Universities have brands, bell towers, art centers, and semi-professional sports teams. As teachers colleges became colleges and colleges became universities, they bought those things, too. The Division II Winona State Warriors, for example, play football at Maxwell Field at Verizon Wireless Stadium, while the powerhouse men’s basketball team went to the Division II national championship game for three consecutive years from 2006 to 2008, winning twice.
Because former normal schools are using the research-university design to conduct the very different task of educating academically diverse undergraduates, they’re often not very good at their jobs. Many graduate fewer than half of their students. Some graduate fewer than a third. Because they continue to train teachers while staying stuck at the lower end of the admissions-selectivity totem pole, they send a lot of less-talented new teachers into K-12 classrooms.
Meanwhile, community colleges are increasingly getting in on the game. What do Northern New Mexico College, Miami Dade College, and the College of Southern Nevada have in common? They all recently dropped “community"—the “teachers” of the 21st century—from their names. As Utah Valley University (nee Utah Technical College at Provo) shows us, the college-for-university swap is just a matter of time.
I don’t begrudge the citizens of Winona their university, or have any reason to believe that its faculty and students are not scholars working in good faith. But a higher-education system in which teachers colleges are building $20-million gymnasiums is a system that is dangerously vulnerable to forces gathering outside the city walls.
Clayton Christensen, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and others examine the vulnerability of older institutions—and the very real threat posed by new ones—in a recent report called “Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education,” just published by the Center for American Progress. Christensen sees online higher education, currently used by nearly one-third of all college students and steadily rising, as a potential “disruptive innovation.”
That pattern, documented by Christensen in scores of other industries, begins with new organizations’ using new technology to create low-cost alternatives to traditional products and services. Crucially, the new products tend not to be very good at first. So established firms ignore them, preferring to continue selling better, more-expensive services to well-off customers in the traditional way. The crisis comes years later, after upstart firms have used steadily improving business practices and technology to move up the industry food chain, and older businesses remain shackled by outdated organizational models and cultures. By the time the upstarts have caught up and become competitive, the old firms simply can’t change quickly enough to avoid oblivion. Once you’ve spent $20-million on a campus gym, you can’t just sell it for cash or stop paying people to work there. Once you’ve established 18 academic departments in the college of liberal arts, it’s hard to shut any of them down.
Those who say, often correctly, that online classes don’t measure up to the best that higher education has to offer are missing the point. The question is: How good will they be 10 or 15 years from now, when the large majority of college students are studying online, and prices at traditional colleges have been driven up to ever-more-stratospheric heights?
The day of reckoning has been delayed in higher education because many of the most obvious disrupter candidates, for-profit colleges, have spent the past decade feeding on the federal student-loan system rather than delivering high-quality courses to students at a low price. But as the raging debate over for-profits shows, the era of easy money and lax regulation is ending. If federal officials do their job right, future for-profits will have to reorient toward high-quality classes and competitive prices. It will be very hard for traditional institutions to respond.
Christensen’s prognosis is not entirely hopeless, though. Examples of how disruptive innovation can be survived do exist. As it happens, two of them can be found less than 50 miles west of Winona State, in Rochester, Minn.
One is a gigantic manufacturing facility owned by IBM. When minicomputers were developed, in the 1950s, many producers of larger, more expensive mainframes were left behind. IBM didn’t try to convert its mainframe facilities and people to the new way. Instead it built an entirely new business unit in Rochester and gave it freedom to act as the logic of the market dictated. No other mainframe manufacturer made the transition. The mile-long Rochester plant still employs thousands of people building midrange computer systems today.
The other hopeful example is the University of Minnesota’s newest branch campus, built in renovated commercial space in downtown Rochester, two blocks from the Mayo Clinic. It doesn’t have 18 departments. In fact, it doesn’t have any, because every student is pursuing an interdisciplinary health-sciences degree. Faculty biologists, chemists, writers, and philosophers work together to deliver the curriculum. The campus library consists of a librarian and a strong Wi-Fi connection. Students exercise at the local YMCA, drive to Minneapolis for football games on weekends, and seem none the worse for wear.
It will be difficult for long-established institutions to avoid the temptation of hunkering down and hoping that obsolescence comes later rather than sooner. We shouldn’t count on another outcome. Fortunately, there is no reason that public officials can’t build new, low-cost colleges and universities that aren’t burdened by a century of trying to ape the research university. There is nothing preventing public institutions from doing what for-profit colleges have already done—enroll tens of thousands of students in online courses—but with the goal of service instead of shareholder enrichment.
Nothing, that is, beyond a fatal inability to imagine something other than a palace on a hill.
