“We can no longer afford for higher education to be a slot machine with a few hitting the jackpot and most going home with less money in their pocket and no better off.”
Are you myopic about American higher education? To find out, see if you can name 50 universities in the U.S. that i) don’t have the name of a state in their name and ii) don’t have a division I football or basketball team. Remember that there are 6000 Title IV eligible colleges and universities in the US, so I’m asking you to name less than 1 in 100 of American schools.
Most people can’t. And most people, when they picture a college, think of an 18-22 year old at Harvard. Yet only 29% of America’s students are 18-22 year-olds attending a four year college full time. By comparison, 43% are over 25.
This, says Craig, is symptomatic of a problem in American higher education: that people think that the Ivy Leagues have discovered the only way to teach, and that everywhere else is just an inferior version trying to be like them. Leaving aside whether a school with no endowment can emulate one with $30 billion in the bank, it is this illusion that means many students drop out, take out loans they regret, and are otherwise disappointed by the system. In the top 50 schools, graduation rates are near 90%: for four year colleges overall, they’re 55%, and for 2 year colleges they are 29%.
College Disrupted looks at a range of modern trends in higher education, from technology to unbundling to internationalization, and looks at what education can and should look like in response. The book is choc-full of fascinating ideas and insights, and if some of his predictions are almost certainly wrong, they are all worth thinking about.
His final suggestion is that, appalling as the idea may initially sound, the American education system learn to value diversity, and establish a two-tier system: Harvard and its ilk for the elite students, and cheaper, online and technology-rich credentials for the rest. Not an ideal system, but a more honest one, in which students can get what they pay for, instead of paying enormous tuitions to support faculty who do not benefit them and buildings that do not enhance their learning.
I can’t possibly cover all the interesting ideas College Disrupted does, and I’m not going to try. There are a lot. My only criticism would be the book can sometimes feel disorganized, and a bit hard to take concise lessons away from. Since that’s also true of higher education sometimes, perhaps that’s unsurprising. Regardless, a fascinating and educational book, and well worth the read.
Disclosure: I read College Disrupted as an advance reader copy. You can see Amazon’s reviews of College Disrupted here.