The Edge

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

A futuristic vision for higher education, five years on.

Five years ago, students and faculty members at the Stanford University d.school released “Stanford 2025,” a futuristic vision for higher education. Part thought experiment, part design exercise, “Stanford 2025” added some creative fuel to the discussions about new directions for the college experience and the future of higher education.

Now the d.school has produced a follow-up, “Stanford 2025 Revisited: Uncharted Territory,” which it recently shared with me. Here’s a link to an introduction, which will take you to the report; it was conceived to resemble a travel guide because, as the project’s director, Jessica Munro, told me, “When you’re abroad and outside your own context, you’re often able to see things with new eyes.”

If you’re the kind of person who gets antsy at the jargon around “design thinking,” be warned: You might want to stop reading this newsletter now and just check back with me next week. But I hope you don’t — because even though this new report doesn’t quantify or break as much new ground on the state of innovation progress in higher ed nearly as much as I wish it did, it still has some useful examples and insights.

The original report was built around four “provocations” (yeah, here it comes) that could revolutionize undergraduate education at Stanford and elsewhere. The one that really stirred my and other folks’ juices was the proposal called Open Loop University. It was a simple notion: Instead of designing institutions for students who would go to college for four years right after high school, Stanford and other universities would be reconfigured so they could offer six years of baccalaureate-level education over students’ lifetimes.

Open Loop University is also the idea that inspired what must certainly be one of the most reproduced set of doodles of the past five years among a certain set of self-styled higher-ed thought leaders.

One represents the current rigidly front-loaded form of education at the beginning of adulthood:

And the other, a loop-the-looping one, representing learning opportunities over a lifetime:

What I loved — and still love — about this open-loop idea is how it could dovetail with people’s needs for lifelong learning. And as the Stanford folks envisioned at the time, it could also lead to more interesting classrooms “enriched by both the naïve, bold perspectives of younger-than-average classmates, and the wisdom of the experienced, older ones.”

Great idea. But not that easy to execute. Munro agreed, noting that many structural barriers still stand in the way, including that colleges are still location-based, the “mind-set of who a student is,” and probably most crucially, the difficulty of developing a tuition model around this new approach.

Still, she said she and her colleagues had seen some “steppingstones” in that direction. She even considers the growing interest in income-share agreements as one of the “hints and glimmers” of progress on the tuition-model front. I’m less convinced.

The three other big ideas of the original “Stanford 2025” were: shifts in where and when learning happens; how it is measured; and the purpose of college. The ideas, a d.school project, were never adopted as any sort of plan for Stanford itself, although officials in the registrar’s office there remain heavily involved in national discussions to develop new kinds of college transcripts to more broadly reflect student learning.

In “Uncharted Territory,” d.school officials look beyond Palo Alto, to present what they call “an on-the-ground, current-plane-of-existence perspective, looking at models already reshaping the student-learning experience.” (I warned you about the jargon, didn’t I?)

I won’t pretend here. I didn’t do my own reporting on the 12 case studies they use to illustrate the contention that these institutions are indeed making progress in areas such as changing the pace at which students attend college or changing the kinds of spaces where learning takes place.

And I certainly won’t dare attest to all the claims of student-centeredness the report attributes to the institutions it profiles, although from my direct knowledge of College Unbound, Georgetown University, Minerva, the University of Utah Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute, and Western Governors University, I can say that these are places where higher ed certainly hasn’t been business as usual.

Munro says “Uncharted Territory” was never intended to be comprehensive. The report’s authors began with nearly 200 examples and chose a dozen to highlight because they represent diversity in their design approaches, with examples exemplifying change from the grass roots, the top down, and the fringes — along with models started from scratch.

Since many of the institutions profiled may already be well known to people, the “how” of these examples may ultimately be more useful than the “what.” That was certainly the case for me with the profile of Indian River State College, in Florida. I’ve never written about this institution or been to its campuses, although I’m aware that it won the 2019 Aspen Prize for its work in guiding students to graduation and jobs.

But from my own recent reporting on “The Innovation Imperative,” I’ve become attuned to strategies that matter, like breaking down institutional silos. The report’s description of Indian River cited the importance of getting academic and advising personnel on the same page as crucial to its success. That rang true to me.

I also heard a lot about the value of longevity in university-leadership posts versus “careerist” presidents, so I found it interesting that the president of Indian River, Edwin Massey, has been at its helm since 1988. Massey just announced he would retire this summer.

Seeing value in the “incremental.”

The new report also includes commentary from key players, to highlight, as Munro put it, “the humans behind the innovation” and the obstacles they faced. That was no afterthought. Just as “Stanford 2025” helped to jump-start some conversations, Munro said the d.school hopes this new report will help people connect with one another. “There’s a real hunger out there,” she told me.

It would be easy to look back at Stanford 2025 and call it a dud. After all, none of its four provocations have become mainstream practices in today’s academy. Understandably, “Uncharted Territory” avoids that facile frame, highlighting instead how small changes, like getting an interdisciplinary experience formally recognized in a university bureaucracy, can be a victory. Even the “incremental” steps matter, Munro said. “We want to celebrate the full spectrum of innovation.”

OK, sure. But I wonder what that says about the willingness and readiness of higher education to adapt to its new realities — especially after seeing the findings in another new report, “The Transformation-Ready Higher-Education Institution,” released last week by the American Council on Education, Georgia Tech, and Huron, a consulting firm, and based on a survey of nearly 500 college leaders, half of them presidents.

Among that report’s findings: “Increasing and new forms of competition for prospective students” are the revenue and market factors most likely to have an impact on colleges in the next five years. And more than a quarter of those surveyed said they were not confident that their institution was prepared to respond.

For all the merits of celebrating the small steps, tinkering just might not be enough.

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