A new Chronicle Intelligence report, “The Innovation Imperative: The Buzz, the Barriers, and What Real Change Looks Like,” goes beyond the hype to take a look at real work and progress around innovation, as well as the barriers that can make change so difficult to achieve. The following excerpt, by Goldie Blumenstyk, describes this landscape. To purchase the full report and other Chronicle Intelligence products, go to Chronicle.com/TheStore.
Whether you’re energized, skeptical, or a bit of both, there’s no denying that the innovation imperative has become an animating force in college leadership since the 2000s, and especially in the wake of the Great Recession. More than a talking point and a conference theme, it is now a currency of its own, a standard by which institutions and presidents are judged and even ranked.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what gave rise to the widespread view that most colleges are desperately in need of reinvention. But as the recession was still wreaking havoc, the concept of “disruptive innovation” — a process of transforming an industry by introducing basic alternatives to premium versions of existing products and services — set higher education abuzz. The book The Innovative University, by Clayton M. Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and management guru, and Henry J. Eyring, a businessman and college administrator, came out in 2011 and argued that institutions needed to adapt quickly to survive.
Consider the times: Colleges were not only grappling with budget woes but, more than ever before, reckoning with poor results. Growing numbers of students from historically underserved populations were enrolling but often not making it to graduation. Advocates and policy makers, including President Barack Obama, had started pushing for vastly higher national educational-attainment levels while holding college leaders’ feet to the fire on quality. As tuition rose, so did public resentment. Demographic change meant greater competition for students. Educators realized that business as usual was no longer good enough.
The higher-education audience has been at once receptive and resistant. Are new and different ideas necessarily better?
And whose ideas are they? MOOCs promised broad access to college and economies of scale, but they also represented the intrusion of Silicon Valley and, to some, the commodification of higher education. Declines in state support contributed to the growing influence of private capital and targeted philanthropy.
Swipes at colleges for not being innovative enough used to come primarily from lawmakers with an accountability agenda. Amid all the hype, there is a reality that’s often overlooked. Higher education has been evolving and innovating from within for centuries and continues to do so today. It’s just that even fundamental changes might not be that apparent.
“We still have desks. We still have people in front of the room,” says Suzanne Walsh, president of Bennett College and a veteran of three major foundations. “If you don’t know what to look for, sure, higher ed looks exactly the same.”
It isn’t.
A classroom may resemble one from decades ago, but the students in it could be using free open-source materials instead of commercial textbooks, participating in group projects and other active-learning activities, choosing courses through “guided pathways” to degrees and careers, and connecting regularly with advisers, thanks to technology-powered alerts and nudges.
Meanwhile, online education continues to grow, revolutionizing the form and practice of teaching, and creating some mega-universities along the way. Arizona State, Southern New Hampshire, and Western Governors Universities have become online powerhouses, three of several institutions that barely registered nationally two decades ago but now collectively enroll some one-million students online.
People worship at the altar of innovation. You can be innovative, and actually be ineffective.
Institutions around the country are overhauling academic programs, redesigning courses, and finding many different ways to serve more students better. The mania for MOOCs seems almost quaint now, as they have evolved into, for the most part, online platforms for professional-education courses and degrees. Predictions that hundreds and possibly thousands of colleges will be forced to close have quieted down from several years ago.
Yet there’s a persistent impression that colleges are inexorably stuck in their ways, too hopelessly mired in the past to rethink how they do things. To be sure, the sector is still rife with problems. Change doesn’t come easily, especially in decentralized organizations. Moves often aren’t as comprehensive as they need to be (in disruptorspeak, they’re not “at scale”). Nor are many of them as deep as reformers might want. But more college leaders are mobilizing.
There’s nuance in the discussion now, and less infatuation with the next big thing. As the innovation movement presses on, a few guiding principles have emerged:
1. Lingo can be counterproductive.
When Christensen applied the “disruptive innovation” theory to colleges, the goal was to signal the potential for traditional higher education to be upended, says Michael B. Horn, a consultant and co-founder of the Christensen Institute. “If it were just called ‘primitive improvement that causes change,’” he says, “I don’t think that it would capture attention.”
But lingo can make people wary, especially if — in a time of financial stress — a new buzzword starts to seem like a euphemism for unwelcome change. Achieving the Dream, a 15-year-old organization that works to improve student outcomes at community colleges, tries not to use the term “innovation” with member institutions, because it can scare away otherwise willing collaborators. On many campuses, says Karen A. Stout, the group’s president, “it’s become code for ‘Do more with less.’”
Even without the specter of budget cuts, campus stakeholders might be quick to attribute big announcements or pushes for reinvention to the motivations of a careerist leader. The process loses its power, says Stout, if it is seen as simply “changing everything the last president did.”
Even worse, with billions of dollars from investors and foundations going into ed-tech companies, so-called innovation may seem like the product of outside forces rather than of legitimate student or institutional needs.
Some folks in higher education would prefer to avoid what they see as a cool-kids club of college and business leaders lighting up the conference circuit with elevator pitches and self-congratulatory presentations. A few years ago, Achieving the Dream sent several college presidents to one of the splashy confabs, the ASU GSV Summit. They weren’t impressed, Stout recalls. “They felt like it was a big sales conference.”
As certain institutions are held up as exemplars of innovation, divides in the sector can feel wider. Super innovators show that change is possible, and several of their approaches and lessons may translate. But some institutions can be intimidated, not knowing where to start or what to try next.
2. A bureaucracy can evolve.
Even when college leaders know why and how they want to transform their institutions, they face some formidable barriers — financial, structural, and cultural.
The old familiar silos still largely stand, says Jonathan Gagliardi, assistant vice president for strategy, policy, and analytics at Lehman College, part of the City University of New York. A higher-education researcher and strategist who recently went to work on a campus, he believes colleges need more people “connecting things and breaking down walls.”
His new position is a prime example. In fact, more than 200 institutions now have senior positions with words like “innovation” or “digital” in their title, and another 200 have roles in online learning “that are often connected to broader academic-innovation efforts,” according to a report in 2018 by the consulting firm Entangled Solutions.
Progress takes time and requires building relationships. Colleges aren’t designed for rapid-fire change, says Gagliardi. “But they are calibrated for long-term, sustainable evolution.” Otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing steady increases in completion rates at many institutions, including Lehman, where a shift from graduation auditors to graduation specialists has helped coach more students to the finish line.
To improve results, colleges need to find ways to give incentives for new ideas and offer technical support across the institution. Many foundations and government agencies have provided resources for particular efforts.
Rufus Glasper, a former chancellor of the Maricopa Community Colleges and now president of the League for Innovation in the Community College, saw that with a federal program aimed at creating more partnerships between two-year institutions and industry. With nearly $2 billion in federal money flowing during a four-year period that ended in 2018, colleges created more than 2,600 programs of study to help workers train or retrain for careers.
3. Innovation is not an end in itself.
“People worship at the altar of innovation,” says Mark Milliron, co-founder of the data-analytics company Civitas Learning. A former chancellor and foundation official, he has seen such devotion blind its adherents. “You can be innovative,” he says, “and actually be ineffective.”
Meaningful change isn’t adopting new technology. It doesn’t come from chasing silver bullets. Transformation toward certain goals requires careful self-study and originating or adapting ideas to suit your students and institution.
Six years ago, Kathleen deLaski founded the nonprofit Education Design Lab to help colleges looking to try new strategies, particularly to serve historically underrepresented “new majority” students. Since then the lab has worked with more than 100 institutions on projects like testing employers’ interest in alternative credentials and improving transfer pathways for single mothers.
The network model, in which several campuses commit to specific goals or reforms, share ideas, and support one another through common challenges, is spreading well beyond one of the early examples, the 11-member University Innovation Alliance. Benefits such as grants, technical assistance, and research on outcomes can help leaders refine their approaches and gauge results.
Given the influence of the ed-tech industry — and more broadly, digital culture — many people automatically think innovation must involve technology. But that’s hardly the only vehicle. Some of the most important innovations taking hold in higher education today include new models of developmental education and efforts to meet students’ basic needs for food and housing.
The impulse for college leaders to talk the innovation talk, to signal that they are responsive to changing needs, is understandable in today’s climate. But those leaders should be vigilant that they’re putting their energy in the right place. Their goals may shift from, say, raising completion rates to better preparing students for an evolving economy, but the point is to ensure that innovation is not an end in itself.
Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; subscribe to her weekly newsletter, The Edge; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.
