The Edge

I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education covering innovation in and around academe. Subscribe here. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week.

Smart talk on equity and student success.

Greetings from San Diego, where by the time you read this, more than 4,800 education-company investors, executives (actual and wannabe), policy wonks, and even a few real-life educators will have converged for the 10th annual ASU GSV Summit.

As it has grown over the past decade, ASU GSV has increasingly echoed a corporate vibe — no judgment here, just saying — and I’ll have more to report on the goings-on next week. (As I write now, the sessions — and the parties — haven’t begun yet.)

But some great conversations on innovation are already underway. They include the set of talks from higher-education leaders that I heard Sunday at a Leadership Forum co-hosted by Arizona State University and The Chronicle. Themes of equity and student success grounded the event, which featured short presentations and interviews with about a dozen provosts, deans, and professors, including my closing conversation with ASU’s president, Michael Crow. (The CliffsNotes version: Be student-centered and the rest will follow.)

Here are three other ideas and pieces of advice that stuck with me.

Give student success its seat at the big-kids’ table. If you care about student success, said Mark Becker, president of Georgia State University, make it count. Appoint someone to be responsible for it, and then be sure that person has “direct access to the president and direct access to the budget decisions.” In the case of Georgia State, which is by now well-known for reducing income-based disparities in its graduation and retention rates, that person is Tim Renick, a senior vice president who is responsible for seeing how the university operates as the student experiences it.

Build your own pipelines. It’s no breeze attracting low-income minority students if you’re a small liberal-arts college in the rural Midwest. But as Sean Decatur, president of Kenyon College, described it, an institution’s geography doesn’t have to be its destiny. The Kenyon Academic Partnership provides college-level courses to rural and urban high schools in Ohio that lack Advanced Placement and other advanced courses. Kenyon enrolls about 1,700 traditional-age undergraduates on its campus — and, thanks to this program, an additional 1,000 who are still in high school. It also offers financial aid for its Camp 4, a three-week summer-immersion program it holds on campus for high schoolers.

Don’t forget the parents. For some parents, especially those unfamiliar with higher ed, the college experience can be very intimidating. Cynthia Teniente-Matson, president of Texas A&M University at San Antonio, has discovered a simple way to ease the anxiety: “I give them my phone number.” As part of its orientation, the college makes sure parents are introduced to the success coach assigned to each student, and that they are made aware of what academic information can and cannot be shared with them. At an institution where two-thirds of students are Latino, low-income, or first-generation, that outreach is not a matter of coddling students or indulging their over-involved parents, Teniente-Matson told me. It’s a way to share information with people who never had the privilege of the college experience. As she put it so succinctly: “These are not snowplow parents.”

2U paid $750 million for a coding boot camp. Here’s why you should care.

Trilogy Education is a coding bootcamp and digital-skills-training company that is building its business on a model resembling the one used by online-program managers. As we’ve reported, it develops partnerships with colleges and creates coding schools under their brand names, most recently with the Harvard Extension School. So it was perhaps fitting that one of the biggest OPMs, 2U, is now buying Trilogy. Under a deal announced on Monday, 2U will buy Trilogy, which is privately held, for $400 million in cash and $350 million in 2U stock.

I can’t say much about Trilogy’s outcomes: The company isn’t as public about those as some other boot camps. But the size of this transaction may tell us a something about the business of OPMs and their need to diversify beyond offerings built around the college degree. 2U took a step on that path not long ago, when it acquired a company called GetSmarter.

More broadly, I think this deal also says something important about the value of ventures that can provide training in digital skills. That’s largely because of the reporting I’ve been doing for the skills-gap project I’ve been discussing, which will come out next week. (Yes, finally, I finished it!) Every expert I talked with cited facility with data and digital technology as a vital 21st-century skill. As with online education, that may or may not mean finding an outsourcing partner to get the job done. But it certainly means making digital-skills training a part of the package.

Does your college put tweaks over transformation?

(Most weeks Brock Read edits this newsletter. This week, he’s helping write it. Read on.)

Saul Kaplan’s job is to make change happen in sectors that aren’t exactly known for their agility — health care, government, and yes, higher education. Which industry is the most resistant to new approaches? Put Kaplan, founder of the Providence-based Business Innovation Factory, in a room with dozens of college leaders, and he doesn’t mince words: “You have the most intransigent business model on the planet.”

Kaplan made his case last week at “The Entrepreneurial College Leader,” an event hosted in Boston by The Chronicle and sponsored by Babson College, an institution known for its focus on developing entrepreneurs. In a panel discussion moderated by Scott Carlson, a senior writer at The Chronicle, Kaplan and James V. Koch, president emeritus of Old Dominion University, traced the qualities of transformative leaders.

What makes higher ed so resistant to change? Kaplan has a theory. Innovative organizations find ways to cultivate two types of change: incremental improvement and disruptive transformation. The structure of most colleges, he says, drops both of those types into one bucket — a sure way to fall back on cautious incrementalism. As Kaplan puts it, higher ed is “organized for tweaks, not for transformation.”

Now for the million-dollar question: What would a better structure look like? That’s too complicated a topic for one panel discussion, but Koch, an economist, offered one potential source of inspiration: Caterpillar, the construction-equipment firm that engineered a famous turnaround in the 1980s. (Koch co-wrote the definitive book on Caterpillar.) The company, Koch says, devotes a proportion of its annual revenue to skunk-works projects — small-group research-and-development efforts that run outside standard organizational channels. That sends a message, and it keeps tweaks and transformation in separate buckets. But, as Koch says, “very few colleges do that.”

Does yours? Should it? Let us know what you think.

Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know at goldie@chronicle.com.

Correction
A company in this article was originally misidentified. It is GetSmarter, not Getting Smarter. The name has been corrected.