The Edge

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I’m not Goldie Blumenstyk. I’m Scott Carlson, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, here to offer my thoughts about innovation in academe, while Goldie enjoys a vacation. Here’s what’s on my mind this week.

We need a culture of experimentation in higher education.

Recently, I went to Portland, Ore., to see the Wayfinding Academy, a two-year college founded in 2015 by Michelle Jones, an expert on organizational psychology. It’s housed in an old YWCA on the north side of town. I’ve written about a lot small colleges in my time at The Chronicle, but Wayfinding might be the smallest — just 15 students currently enrolled (with six more arriving in January), and 19 alumni.

But the college’s unusual approach has captured attention. Wayfinding’s student-to-media-coverage ratio might rival even that of Southern New Hampshire University and its savvy president, Paul LeBlanc:

• My former colleague Jeff Young wrote an epic story about Wayfinding in EdSurge.
• The New York Times described it in a lengthy column about evolving education models.
• Ireland’s University Times highlighted its “kinder” approach to education.
• Wayfinding’s founder, Michelle Jones, has been featured in a TED talk.

And now Wayfinding is featured here in The Edge. Not bad for a tiny college still seeking regional accreditation.

Jones spent years as a professor at institutions like Concordia University at Portland, Providence College, and the University of Puget Sound. In time she grew disenchanted, believing that colleges emphasized bureaucracy and reputation over student growth and learning. She dreamed up an institution at which students would discover their passions, learn how those interests connect with various systems in the world, cultivate the “soft skills” necessary to succeed, and ponder what makes a good life.

Today, those topics — along with internships and learning experiences at various local businesses and nonprofits — make up the two-year core curriculum of Wayfinding.

“I don’t think it needs to take a young person four years to figure out what they want to do with their life and get started doing it,” Jones says. Nor should experimental college curricula focus exclusively on young people, she believes. Most folks, she points out, do not have a college degree. And many of those who dropped out carry shame (and sometimes debt). Wayfinding, where the average age of students is 21, has appeal for those who took a run at college that didn’t pan out, maybe because of a learning disability, a lack of direction, or a mismatched cultural fit.

Maya Micheli grew up in Logan, Utah. Queer and an artist, Micheli struggled a bit in school and didn’t want to go to college with a cohort of peers just getting back from a Mormon mission. “It’s almost like high school all over again,” Micheli says. “I just needed to get out of that.” Micheli discovered Wayfinding through a podcast, and the notion of real-world learning around adults — particularly in Portlandia — was appealing.

“Just having a community where you’re accepted for who you are, which I’m not used to in Utah, is really cool,” Micheli says. “Most of the art I create is nudes. That’s not allowed in Utah. People don’t really talk to you about your art.” A professor from Utah State University, a friend of the family who read about Wayfinding in the Times, helped Micheli cover Wayfinding’s $11,000 annual tuition.

Starting a new institution is tough.

Ty Adams quit a more lucrative job at an RV dealership to become marketing manager for Wayfinding. If it can just get to 20 students per cohort, he says, that would be ideal. Although Wayfinding has been approved by Oregon’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission, a big hurdle is regional accreditation, which the college is pursuing. Without it, students can’t get federal financial aid or easily transfer to a four-year college.

But the mission of Wayfinding — to help students find their passion and purpose — can run against traditional higher education’s metrics. “Sometimes students move on before they graduate because they found their thing and don’t want to wait,” Adams says. “That sometimes can reflect poorly on our graduation rates.”

In the 20th century, higher education had a couple of notable eras for experimental directions. The progressive-education movement in the early part of the century birthed colleges like Goddard, where the founder, Royce S. “Tim” Pitkin, encouraged students to declare what they wanted to learn and how they wanted to learn it. The idealistic 1960s and ‘70s saw the formation of institutions like the College of the Atlantic, which had an environmental focus and only one major, “human ecology.”

Colleges like Bennington, Black Mountain, Franconia, Hampshire, Marlboro, the New College, and Prescott came out of those experimental times. Some of these institutions still exist, and some of them are troubled or long dead. Idealism is no match for financial realities.

Perhaps that’s why conversations today about new educational paradigms focus on scale, delivery, and direct applicability to careers. Investors and speculators — not career educators — often lead those discussions.

Higher education desperately needs innovative, new approaches to learning styles and social impact, not just new delivery forms like MOOCs, says David J. Staley, director of the Humanities Institute and of the Center for the Humanities in Practice at Ohio State University. His new book, Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education, lays out scores of ideas for fresh directions: among them, a system of thousands of “microcolleges,” each with one professor and 20 students; a college that teaches through all the senses, like smell and touch; and a college devoted to play.

While Andrew Carnegie, Leland Stanford, and Cornelius Vanderbilt gave their wealth and names to start-up colleges, the wealthy today often give their dollars to the sector’s established winners. And then there’s that accreditation hurdle.

But what if established universities themselves set up skunkworks projects to support the formation of new experimental colleges? Say, 100 students and a dozen faculty members, pursuing a new curriculum or pedagogy. “If they grow, maybe they spin off as their own enterprise,” Staley says in an interview. “If they fail, they fail.” The University of Wisconsin’s Experimental College, which focused on the Great Books and democracy, was just such a program. It started in 1927 and died in 1932. Red House, the “curriculum incubator” at Georgetown University, might be a modern example.

The problem is, universities have an aversion to failure, Staley says. And they’re not good at stopping things they’ve started.

“If we’re not mindful, the innovation is going to come from without,” he says. Starbucks formed a training partnership with Arizona State University a few years ago. “But Amazon is talking about upskilling 100,000 of their workers,” he says, “and they are going to do it themselves.”

“We could find ourselves competing with newfangled corporate universities,” Staley says. “Are they going to teach philosophy?” Higher education should lead the drive for innovation and experimentation, so that it can retain the qualities it values and make room for students like Maya Micheli.

Got a tip you’d like to share, or a question you’d like Goldie to answer (when she’s back from vacation)? Let her know at goldie@chronicle.com. If you want to follow Goldie on Twitter, @GoldieStandard is her handle. To follow me, Scott Carlson, look for @Carlsonics.