Radical Accountability

Disruption in higher ed. And, what does innovation mean for the liberal arts?

Innovation first happened in higher education according to the script that former Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen, outlined.

Toyota is his classic example. Japanese car manufacturers couldn’t compete with American luxury cars, so instead they came in with budget cars. Their budget cars were just as good as American ones — that is, they were pretty bad — but they were cheaper. The American car companies saw this intervention in the low-end market but disregarded it, thinking that they’d maintain their industry dominance because their mid-range and high-end products were still the top choice. But as we all know, once the Japanese companies dominated the low-end market, they moved into the mid-range market. And the rest is history.

Modern innovation in higher education only really took off with online education. And universities thought: That’s fine. Let them have it. It will never compete with Ivy programs and top liberal arts colleges. The rationale for traditional institutions not listening to the disruption was that these online degrees weren’t for their market. They were for professional (that is, older) students and for demographics that wouldn’t normally go to a four-year school.

Obviously, they were wrong.

Or, at least, the mid-level universities that habitually followed the example of Ivy schools were wrong, as online programs started chipping away at their target demographics. Today, these same mid-level universities have their own online degrees. But it’s too late. The Southern New Hampshires, Western Governors, and Liberty’s of the country beat them to the punch with cheap, convenient, and accelerated online degrees programs. I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard of mid-tier universities launching and closing and relaunching and closing again their online initiatives.

But aren’t online degree programs lower quality?

No, they’re not, at least not for the educational goals of a huge population of college students. Universities did this to themselves. In efforts to scale up, they increased class sizes, reverted to “edutainment,” and deployed passive learning strategies. They doubled down on the “college experience” instead of the education. And the market saw through it.

That’s a hard thing to do. The higher ed market is so insulated from market forces by federal funding and accreditation that, in order for disruption to occur, institutions really need to be selling the farm.

Big name schools tried to undercut this market trend by creating their own online courses. MOOCS, they were called. And many of these courses from places like MIT and Stanford were free! We’ll show them, they thought. But ironically these MOOCS just proved the point. They prompted people to question the relative value of different educational options and their goals.

Yes, of course, asynchronous online video classes are not offering a transformative education. They’re not providing a community. And for all of the online message-boards and learning systems they use, they’re not challenging students with the higher forms of learning — analysis, creation, organic interaction.

But here’s the thing about cheap education. It’s cheap. And when a cheap product enters the market, it causes people to rethink what it is that they really want to get out of this. Somebody comes across a fake luxury watch for 5% the price of the real thing, and they began to reflect on the reasons for which they want a luxury watch. Alongside being status symbol, providing aesthetic pleasure, telling the time, and making an impression on passers-by, quality of construction is only one of many reasons to own a fancy watch. Similarly, for a fraction of the price and a quarter of the time commitment, someone can get a degree, advance their career, and meet expectations. Sure, they sacrifice personal intellectual growth, but for many, the more expensive product doesn’t make sense.

Liberal arts colleges might be the clearest examples. They’re really expensive. They’re legacy schools. Their brand names don’t go as far as Stanford’s and Princeton’s. And while they aren’t as competitive as the Ivy’s, they’re often just as prestigious. But we have 40% fewer liberal arts colleges in the nation today than we had in 1990.

Disruption in higher ed has gone way beyond online education.

We see disruption in high schools. The growth of AP tests, early college credit, and dual enrollment occurs in high school but counts as disruption in higher ed.

Innovation is also happening in curricular structure. Especially through stackable degrees and micro-credentials, fewer college-going young adults than ever are doing the traditional 4-year track. They’re cobbling together units from high school, community college, online schools, state schools, and private universities.

The borders around universities are breaking down. We see this in educational initiatives with companies like Target, Starbucks, and Google.

And one of the biggest disruptions in higher ed is through Prior Learning Assessment. PLA is what institutions call the units that are credited to students for life experience. Suppose you’re a 40-year-old with 20 years of career experience or with military experience. You can apply to a university (especially an online or “professional” program) and receive dozens of units toward your degree before you even take classes — over half of a degree’s worth. I’m actually a fan of this innovation, depending on the learning goals of a school. If the point of education at a certain university is really just to get a degree as evidenced by basic know-how, then it’s clear that you’re average 40-year-old with 20 years of work experience possesses way more know-how than most 4-year college grads.

But now disruption in higher ed has reached new heights.

Enter: the ideological culture war over education.

Cancel culture, college dis-invitations of speakers, perceptions of homogenous radical ideas, the creation of new overtly conservative universities, violent student protests, the government prosecuting and deporting grad students. Despite what you think about any one of these current events, the very fact that they’re all happening at an accelerated rate is evidence of an increase in vulnerabilities.

When disruption enters the ideological arena, then institutions are especially fragile. That’s because it takes more for a person to make a decision based on principle than it is for someone to make a decision in reaction to material need or habit. Our habits and reactions are like psychological technologies that protect us from having to reflect philosophically about every decision we make. Nowadays, it isn’t uncommon for families to check their default option for education against their beliefs.

In higher ed, that amounts to a noteworthy development.

But what about innovation in the liberal arts?

I’m a liberal artist. I believe that studying the arts of liberty — the disciplines of the humanities and sciences that empower people to understand the order of things and to grow beyond consumerism and impressionability — is still the highest calling of college education.

But it seems like most if not all of the innovations in higher ed have been for all audiences except the students who want a comprehensive liberal arts education. …and maybe deservedly so, since the liberal arts have become a pile of crumbs compared to the sustenance they used to be.

Look around though. Every year, new micro-colleges are returning to the traditional liberal arts and are embracing mentorship and conversation as learning modes. Hildegard College joins a host of others in this national movement. And I’ve gottent 3 to 4 emails every year since we launched from people who are starting new small liberal arts colleges around the country. They all have their own flavor. Hildegard combines liberal arts and entrepreneurship. Other colleges combine them with the trades, or with theology, or with engineering, or with agriculture.

What makes these schools innovative is not just that they’re synthesizing the liberal arts with practical disciplines of study but also that they’re affordable, effective, and free to teach how they think best. It sounds absurd to write down in print, but it’s true: most university faculty would never say that they’re teaching students anywhere near the way they think is best for students.

And the secret ingredient to innovation in liberal arts education is RADICAL ACCOUNTABILITY.

In other words, these schools trust their students and their families.

They tend to grow slowly but surely. At first, it will only be the early adopters who come, often people that come from the communities that the schools emerged from to begin with.

Next, these schools grow in brand recognition with naturally occurring communities that are likeminded. That’s why so many of these new institutions are religious. And many of them align with the classical education movement. Another subsection of them are environmental schools — which might sound random, but it’s true. And now, some of the startup colleges that launched only 25-or-so years ago have lower admission rates than many of the prestigious schools that we’ve all heard of.

These institutions are radically accountable in their financial models. They often offer a single bachelors degree. Their costs are low because they’ve chosen not to bloat them with bureaucratic offices and unnecessary amenities. They have a clear tuition price without hidden fees.

And they know, if they don’t deliver to students what they promise, those students will leave. And that is what is so disruptive about embracing radical accountability. Most universities take the opposite approach. They make it really hard to leave. They saddle students with debt. They sell an experience, not an education, and so their value proposition is unclear.

Above all, radical accountability means entrusting to students the highest ends of learning. Startup colleges don’t pretend to replace other better versions of things, like camps, or employers, or families, or pilgrimages around the world. They proudly point to the end of learning — for us at Hildegard, growth in mind, heart, and hand, to the ultimate end of communion with God — and low-and-behold, their students step up to the challenge. They move into meaningful careers. They change their communities for the better.

The irony is that these startup colleges also achieve the things that most universities scramble for. In my experience, friendship is the most prominent of these. When young adults gather around a common higher calling, their friendships grow deeper too.

That’s where innovation for the liberal arts occurs — in embracing accountability to the market, to parents and students, to the intrinsic goods of the subjects they teach, and, for me at least, to God.

WHAT I’M READING

My friend, Dr. John Seel, was up to his usual lucid and relevant thinking today as a guest writer on Andrew Renn’s blog. His article is about the need to Reset Higher Ed through New Models — happy to see Hildegard College in his shortlist.

Seel writes:

Will we tinker with the current system—repackaging the same model in digital form or merely accept superficial reforms? Or will we fundamentally reimagine education’s purpose, audience, and delivery? An increasing number of people are clamoring for the latter.

Innovation is a buzz word. Higher ed is a much-discussed industry. But put the two together, and the solutions are not so easy to discover. Seel mentions some of the more prevalent reasons for the difficulty of innovating in higher ed, such as the insulation it has from the market and the control of accreditors and federal funds.

Optics is another barrier. Who’s heard of a startup college anyway? But that’s beginning to change. Especially as Gen X and Millennial parents see how college has changed compared to what they experienced 25 years ago — changed in cost, in return on investment, in expectations of students, in the disappearance of the liberal arts, in its relation to the economy — people are more open to new models than they ever have been in recent history.