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Appeared in the July/August 2015 issue of Trusteeship magazine.
Reproduced with permission of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.
Copyright 2015 © All rights reserved. www.agb.org

Dealing
with

Disruption:
By the Book
B y T h eo d o r e j . M a r c h ese

Are we next?”
“All these for-profit competitors and MOOCs...can we survive?”
“Everyone complains about our costs. We need new ideas here!”

Dung Hoang

These statements, which I overheard at several

recent board meetings, reflect trustee concerns and fears.
Board members well know, from Trusteeship and elsewhere,
that public colleges confront state-level disinvestment even
as their independent counterparts watch tuition discounting
devour their budgets. The public clamors about high prices and
growing student debt; it demands accountability. In the face
of these challenges, private equity and venture capitalists have
poured billions of dollars into hundreds of new companies that
would disrupt business as usual in higher education.

s
s

“Every other industry has been disrupted by technology!

TakeAways

1

Private equity and venture capitalists
have poured billions of dollars into
hundreds of new companies that could
disrupt business as usual in higher
education.

2

For-profit, online, and new-venture
­competitors make headlines, but sometimes the most important changes are
cultural and escape notice.

3

Most campuses will survive and most
of the new providers will not, even as
their ventures shake complacency and
extend to wider learning audiences. However, the ideas, capital, and worry about
the future will still lead to significant
transformation.

Appeared in the July/August 2015 issue of Trusteeship magazine.
Reproduced with permission of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.
J U LY/AU G U S T 2 0 1 5
Copyright 2015 © All rights reserved. www.agb.org

9

Remarkable developments are indeed
afoot, but what do we know about them?
In a search for answers, I turned to the
spate of recently published books purporting to explain how higher education
will be disrupted, unbound, remade—or
ended—by new competitors. For busy
board members, is there a book here
worth reading? Or themes to weigh?
Starting on page 13, you’ll find snapshots of the books in question. For board
members, here is what I learned from
these works and subsequent web searches.

For-Profit Competitors:
Coming and Going

Fifteen years ago, the great fear was that
for-profit higher education would become
a major disruptive force for change.
Indeed, in the 10 years that followed,
the for-profits’ share of overall enrollment jumped from 2.9 percent to 11.9
percent.
Then five years ago, a series of
investigative reports uncovered
problems in the industry. In many
instances, it depended largely on federal student-aid monies, and default
rates were high. In addition, job outcomes were often mediocre, and more
revenues frequently went to management, investors, and recruitment than to
instruction. A scathing 2012 U.S. Senate
report prompted tighter federal rules and
oversight.
Meanwhile, the University of Phoenix
saw its enrollments drop from 475,000 to
213,000, and Bridgeport, Career Education, EDMC, and others saw enrollments
plummet, as well. Jones International,
Anthem, and Corinthian, which
once had 116,000 students,
closed.

Thus, for-profits themselves have had
to adapt. DeVry, a top-end competitor that
remains profitable, closed 14 campuses
this spring. Along with Phoenix, and
other companies in the sector, it is moving
most of its operations to online formats.
To increase student completion rates,
some for-profits have augmented online
instruction with tutors, help lines, and
other forms of student support, pinching
margins.
As it developed this past year, the
online market share of traditional brickand-mortar colleges and universities—
many of which copy for-profit delivery
models but enjoy brand, price, and
accreditation advantages—surpassed that
of the for-profit sector. Today, the rising
stars of online education are nonprofits as diverse as the Pennsylvania State University, Indiana
Wesleyan University, Southern
New Hampshire University,
Rio Salado Community
College, and Liberty
University.
The last word has yet
to be spoken about forprofit higher education.
Many companies have
smart management,
access to capital, and
freedom to adapt.
Several are now investing in overseas markets.
A model for that is privately
held Laureate Education,
based in Baltimore, which
counts 850,000 students
on its far-flung campuses,
mostly abroad. According to
Bloomberg, it enjoys annual revenues of more than $4 billion.
In several of the books listed
on pages 13 to 15, the authors
opine that where many for-profits
are today—chastened and hunting
for opportunities—could be where
some traditional colleges will soon find
themselves.

The MOOCs Scare:
Lessons Learned

In fall 2011, Stanford University Professor Sebastian Thrun rocked higher
10

Appeared in the July/August 2015 issue of Trusteeship magazine.

education by putting his computer programming course online for all takers—
and for free. Quickly, more than 166,000
students from 190 countries signed
up. Thrun was soon appearing on “60
Minutes” to describe his Massive Open
Online Course (MOOC). The following
spring, three new companies—EdX,
Coursera, and Udacity (the last of which
was cofounded by Thrun)—formed to
advance the idea, with major universities
standing in line to participate and venture
capital flowing in. Here was higher education’s future!
Well, not quite—at least, not yet.
When the dust settled, it turned out that
only 22,000 (13 percent) of Thrun’s
enrollees actually completed the course;
in the next MOOC that was offered, 8
percent did so. When Thrun offered a
MOOC-like first-level math course at San
Jose State University, students in conventional, face-to-face classes ably outperformed a matched online group. Not least
among the problems facing the three new
companies, after poor student completion and performance rates, was how to
generate revenue for these free offerings,
especially when course-development costs
ran to six figures.
That noted, real lessons emerged.
For one, top minds went to work figuring out how best to teach courses online,
asking, “For what students and subject
matter does this work? With what kinds
of production values and student support?” “How do we bring to bear learnings from neuroscience and artificial
intelligence?” “What about test security?”
And so on. In the past three years, higher
education has learned a lot about using
information technology (IT) to improve
not just online, but also classroom-based
instruction.
Most important, an invisible wall was
breached when institutions like Stanford
University, the University of Michigan,
Carnegie Mellon University, and the
­Massachusetts Institute of Technology—
not just Phoenix—began offering online
courses. A legitimization occurred. Today,
2,000 institutions offer pure online,
blended, or hybrid courses. A survey that
Babson College conducted shows 7.1 million students taking such courses.

T r u s t e e s h i p Reproduced with permission of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.
Copyright 2015 © All rights reserved. www.agb.org

Disaggregation
and Unbundling

Years ago, colleges and universities
embraced the value of outsourcing functions such as food service, maintenance,
security, and the bookstore. A newer array
of consultants now helps institutions
recruit students, manage aid dollars, raise
funds, conduct searches, develop a brand,
engage in campus planning, build IT
infrastructure, and find staff efficiencies.
Up until now, though, little of this has
touched the heartlands of academic and
student affairs. To earn a baccalaureate, a
student has traditionally taken four years
of courses on campus, with the institution’s budget built around that “bundle”
of classwork. But today, a host of fledgling
providers like StraighterLine.com offer
commonly taken courses, such as English
comp and introductory psych, at a fraction
of on-campus tuition. Others, like
Saylor.com, offer courses for free. The rub,
for students, has been that most of the
new providers aren’t regionally accredited,
and thus a college or university needn’t
recognize those credits.
But that has come to an end. In April,
Arizona State University (ASU) and EdX
entered into an agreement whereby a full
slate of first-year courses will be available online for $200 per credit hour
($6,000 for the full year) to any and all
comers. Since ASU is regionally accredited, such coursework is transferrable.
In May, the University of Illinois and
Coursera announced an online MBA for
$1,000 per course or around $20,000
for a degree—a fraction of the $50,000
to $100,000 for on-campus versions.
The Georgia Institute of Technology and
Udacity will offer a computer-science
degree for $7,000. More such alliances
are on the way.
The new MOOC companies have
also inked agreements with IT partners
(Coursera with Google) and corporate
sponsors (EdX with Fiat Chrysler) to offer
credentials that, in effect, bypass the college degree. They seem to be finding their
niches.
Meanwhile, a host of vendors have
emerged with “solutions” that complement or augment courses, tutor students,
advise or coach matriculants, bring

student-earned badges and certificates to
demically Adrift: Limited Learning on
employers, arrange internships, and more. College Campuses (University of Chicago
In some instances, the new provider is
Press), presenting findings across 24
high-minded and provides a real advance. colleges that showed limited freshman-toThe coaching company InsideTrack, for
senior-year gains in student writing and
example, set out 15 years ago to do some- reasoning skills. In recent international
thing about student completion rates and comparisons, American college graduates
developed sophisticated services to get
have fared disappointingly.
students from acceptance to graduation.
This backdrop is relevant today
One million students later, the company
because if it’s all a matter of fungible
demonstrates 15 percent gains in degree
credits, of online that’s as good as the
attainment. (Full disclosure: I served on
traditional, or of pushing more students
its advisory board.)
through to a degree, the nation will never
Plenty of newer firms look merely
get what it needs from its colleges and
opportunistic. But the sheer number of
universities. Nor will students.
them—recent ed-tech gatherings in ­Austin
The potential good news here is that,
and Phoenix had record attendance—plus compared with 15 years ago, we know
their ability to connect
with students and
The last word has yet to
with venture capital,
be spoken about for-profit
suggest they will be a
force to be reckoned
higher education. Many of
with.
these companies have smart
This landscape
management, access to capital,
of new providers,
rapidly evolving, is
and freedom to adapt.
rife with mergers and
acquisitions, partnerships and alliances.
much more now about how people learn
Bigger companies like Pearson Education and about what works in undergraduand John Wiley & Sons have scooped up
ate education. At Carnegie Mellon, EdX,
start-ups to offer “bundled services” that
and elsewhere, teams work to combine
enable colleges to teach online (200 have insights from practitioners, neuroscisigned up for such services so far). Still
ence, artificial intelligence, and the “big
bigger companies—Microsoft, Google,
data” generated by their courses to creand Facebook—watch from the wings.
ate online experiences that prompt the
student engagement and effort required
for deeper learning. The wider impact of
Learning and
these new courses remains unclear, and
Degree Completion
they certainly face obstacles to adoption—
As former Harvard University President
from campuses that fear financial erosion
Derek Bok argues convincingly, the two
to a “not invented here” mentality.
most difficult problems facing American
Mitch Daniels, the former Republican
higher education are bound up in the
governor of Indiana and now president
phenomenon of undergraduate underof Purdue University, last year commisperformance—too few students are
sioned a Purdue-Gallup study of the
learning what they need to learn, and too
outcomes for 30,000 recent graduates—
few complete their degrees. In his view,
how much they earned and how well they
an overall strengthening of undergradunavigated adult life. The most-successful
ate education would bring with it higher
graduates reported certain things in comrates of completion. He documented that
case in a 2006 book, Our Underachieving mon: a professor who made them excited
about learning or cared about them as a
Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much
person, the encouragement of a mentor,
Students Learn and Why They Should
working on a long-term project, a job or
Be Learning More (Princeton University
internship that applied knowledge, and
Press). In 2010, researchers Richard
heavy engagement with extracurricular
Arum and Josipa Roska published Aca-

Appeared in the July/August 2015 issue of Trusteeship magazine.
Reproduced with permission of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.
J U LY/AU G U S T 2 0 1 5
Copyright 2015 © All rights reserved. www.agb.org

11

activities. Three observations: only 14 percent reported having such an education;
it’s not cheap to provide; and these experiences are hard to achieve online.

A Liberal-Education
Counterattack

Academics grew up believing that a college education had three missions: to cultivate self-reflection and a life of the mind
(per Cardinal John Henry Newman’s The
Idea of a University, written in 1852); to
prepare an educated citizenry for life in a
democracy (per Thomas Jefferson); and
to prepare for a life’s work (the Morrill
Land-Grant Acts). As Columbia University professor Andrew Delbanco writes
in College: What It Was, Is, and Should
Be, “The American college has always
been about more than the transmission of
information or the inculcation of skills; it
has been, at its best, about helping young
people prepare for lives of meaning and
purpose.” (See a snapshot of this book on
page 15.)
This explains, in part, the distress
that many faculty members feel when
confronted with today’s focus on cheaper,
faster, and more convenient. In state capitals and Silicon Valley, they notice, it’s all
about getting jobs and boosting the economy; the civic and personal-development
goals seem to have been lost. Convenience
and access are good, but many faculty
members want higher expectations of
students and undergraduate rigor. Faculty
members know from their own experience
with students the validity of the PurdueGallup findings; can such opportunities
for students be preserved? They worry
about politicians who value today over
tomorrow and don’t know much about the
true workings of higher education, as well
as about companies that peddle inferior
education to students from impoverished
backgrounds, saddling them with debt.
Full-time faculty members are concerned
about job security when most of today’s
online instruction is being enacted by
part-time or contingent faculty. But there’s
more than self-interest to their wariness.
Academics applaud the real progress
these past years in understanding what
works in undergraduate education and
what factors promote completion. The
12

Association of American Colleges &
or solutions. For-profit institutions at
Universities (AAC&U) has reviewed best
one time seemed an answer, with tuition
practices from all sectors and developed
rates just above that of the publics and
a clear statement of undergraduate outwell below the independents. But at
comes, with associated pointers for cur$400 to $500 per credit hour and spotty
ricula, teaching, and assessment (“Project outcomes, it’s hard to say they’ve found
LEAP”) that are congruent with the best
The potential good news here is
hopes of academics
that, compared with 15 years ago,
and employers alike.
The AAC&U recomwe know much more now about
mendations assume
how people learn and about
enactment by a fullwhat works in undergraduate
time, in-place faculty
member, a condieducation.
tion that is hard to
meet when 60 percent of undergraduate
a sweet spot. Western Governors Univerinstruction today (up from 35 percent in
sity, entirely online for about $6,000
1975) is done by part-time and continper year and with credible outcomes for
gent faculty. Meanwhile, faculty members its adult audiences, may be one model.
from 600 institutions have taken up the
As The Innovative University: Changing
challenges of the Degree Qualifications
the DNA of Higher Education from Inside
Profile (DQP), a transnational movement Out details, Brigham Young Universityto align curricula, raise standards, specify Idaho represents a traditional campus
degree competencies, and encourage stuwith efficiencies
dent mobility.
carried to the Nth
degree—intense

The Problem of Costs

There’s no simple explanation for the
run-up in college costs, which public
opinion still regards as our greatest problem. Depending on the institution, what
pushes them up can be unfunded student
aid (“tuition discounting”), rising health
care and IT expenses, losses on athletics,
compliance costs, aging infrastructures,
and competitive pressure to keep up with
student and parental expectations—
and the Joneses. Critics observe
tuition levels and think colleges
must be in fat city. But look
closer, and one sees leaky roofs
from years of belt-tightening.
Until recently, higher education’s lobbyists claimed,
rightly, that most students attended low-cost
public institutions,
but public tuitions
often now rise fastest of all.
One has to
look hard to
find convincing models

Appeared in the July/August 2015 issue of Trusteeship magazine.

T r u s t e e s h i p Reproduced with permission of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.
Copyright 2015 © All rights reserved. www.agb.org

scheduling, heavy teaching loads, yearround operations, and more—keeping
costs under $6,000 a semester. But its
six-year graduation rate (54 percent)
remains unprepossessing.
In Designing the New American University, Michael Crow and William Dabars
describe Arizona State University’s determined attentions to costs that have held
tuition steady for years while serving evergreater numbers of students (although its
completion rate remains a relatively low 57
percent). Still another approach is that of
San Francisco-based Minerva University,
which began classes last fall. In partnership
with the Keck Graduate Institute (and with
venture-capital backing), it aspires to instant
elite status. It charges $10,000 a year, and
attracted 11,000 applicants for 70 spaces.
We’ll see how it goes five years from now.
Traditional campuses are enjoined to
cut costs: Kill big-time athletics, go with
part-time faculty, gut student services, and
outsource everything you can. Such steps
come with costs themselves, of course,
whether to learning or public approbation. So the conversation continues.
The unanswered questions about costs
are matched by what we have yet to learn
about online education and undergraduate effectiveness. The root problem has
been the drying up of federal and foundation support for innovative experiments.
According to an estimate by Ryan Craig in
College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling
of Higher Education, the amount spent on
educational research is 1/140th of that
for medical research. (See a snapshot of
each of the three books listed in this section on the following pages.)

Reflections

For-profit, online, and newventure­competitors make headlines, but sometimes the most
important changes are cultural
and escape notice.
For most of the history of
American higher education,
parents—through taxes, savings, and donations—paid
the bill. Then came the idea
that the prime beneficiary
of a college education was
not the public but the

student, who after all would enjoy higher
earnings over a lifetime; therefore the
student should pay. This new understanding—a public good becomes a private
good—justified everything from tuition
hikes to state disinvestment to student
loans. In 1987, the volume of loans surpassed that of grants and never went back.
Thus, today, we have graduates with an
average debt approaching $30,000 and
student bodies in which, to forestall further
borrowing, 90 percent of students work
an average of 25 to 30 hours a week—
commitments not unrelated to student
job-mindedness and the pursuit of specific
majors to maximize their earnnings.
Another change in mindset, a generation in the making, has to do with collegegoing itself. If earlier generations went to
college for an education, today more go
for the courses and a degree that lead to
a job. The latter approach prizes product
over process, convenience over rigor, good
enough over deeper engagement, the
vocational over the intellectual and civic.
All of these shifts open doors to commodification and disaggregation.
Board members will know that the
changes recounted here are easy to exaggerate—as well as to underestimate. The
past four years have seen more new developments than in the previous 25, taxing
the wisdom of boards and challenging the
strategic plans that they oversee.
Yet most campuses will survive; they
offer an indispensable experience. Most
of the new providers will not survive,
even as their ventures shake complacency
and extend learning to wider audiences.
Taken together, the elements seem at
hand—ideas, capital, and worry about the
future—for significant transformation.
Inventive minds are at work; attentions are
concentrated. The days ahead may write a
new chapter in the history of an essential
institution. n
Author: Theodore J. Marchese is a senior
consultant with AGB Search and a former
trustee of Eckerd College and editor of Change
magazine.
T’Ship Links: J. Terrence Franke, “Needed: A
New Style of Leader for the New Era.” March/
April 2014. Kenneth C. Green, “Mission,
MOOCs, and Money.” January/February 2013.

10
Recent Reads

A

t least 10 books
have come out in
recent months or
within the past few
years about the
“disruption” or “unbundling”
of higher education. The first
seven listed below bear directly
on the point. The final three
offer relevant perspective.

American Higher Education in Crisis?
What Everyone Needs to Know
by Goldie Blumenstyk (Oxford University
Press, 2014).
Here’s a winner, a book
for all board members,
from a long-time
reporter for the
Chronicle of Higher
Education. Blumenstyk
takes pretty much all
the issues we in higher
ed are talking about, poses them in 75 or
so questions, and answers each in factfilled paragraphs, 154 pages in all. To
her, there’s no killer app in sight but a
combination of ideas, actors, and money
that will reshape higher education. Her
book displays a reporter’s gift for clear
exposition, a keen sense for best
sources, and the deeper knowledge of a
scholar. An entire board might read it
prior to a planning retreat.

The End of College: Creating
the Future of Learning and the
University of Everywhere
by Kevin Carey (Riverhead Books, 2015).
This widely discussed, and both praised
and bashed, book offers a critical take
on the American university—seldom
appreciating its multiple missions and

Appeared in the July/August 2015 issue of Trusteeship magazine.
Reproduced with permission of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.
J U LY/AU G U S T 2 0 1 5
Copyright 2015 © All rights reserved. www.agb.org

13

real-life predicaments,
while lambasting its
pretensions,
costs, and
beggaring
of student
learning. From his perch at
the New America Foundation, Carey sees universities
beset by contradictions and
protected by a wall of regulations, public subsidy, and cultural habit. That wall is about
to come tumbling down,
sooner than you think, he
predicts, supplanted by a University of Everywhere in which
any learner anywhere in the
world with an Internet connection can take any course or
degree at little cost.
The likelihood of this may
be questionable, but Carey
shines in his description of
new IT- and AI-based courseware at Carnegie Mellon,
EdX, and other providers
that is personalized, engaging, and effective—as well as
in his depiction of how the
monopoly on credentials that
traditional institutions enjoy
can be broken by making
student skills discoverable
by employers independent
of a degree. (The $1.5 billion
acquisition of Lynda.com by
LinkedIn this April affirms his
point.) A book to recommend,
if for no other reason than for
its alternative view.

The Innovative University:
Changing the DNA of
Higher Education from the
Inside Out
by Clayton Christensen and
Henry Eyring (Jossey-Bass,
2011). 

14

Clay
Christensen
of the
Harvard
Business
School
(HBS) is
well known
for his theory of “creative
disruption”: the idea that fat
cats fall because they
continually enhance what they
do and become unaffordable
to customers. Meanwhile, new
entrants thrive by offering
“good enough” at an
affordable price point—think
Toyota, from humble
beginnings, overtaking
General Motors. For the
authors, that will be the story
for traditional higher
education, too, as its “DNA”
ever pushes it toward the
bigger and better, seldom
toward the simpler and more
affordable, while its disruptors
will be its new for-profit
competitors. (Alas, for this
thesis, came the for-profit
downfall a year after
publication.)
Their 401-page book details
Harvard University’s development (the presumptive
model to be disrupted) and a
description of Brigham Young
University-Idaho, an institution remade by HBS alumni
into a super-efficient, low-cost
provider for a predominantly
Latter-day Saints constituency.
Despite the authors’ repeated
calls for outcome-based “success measures,” none are presented for BYU-I. The book’s
main virtue is that it takes seriously the problem of costs,
which others elide. Still, it’s a
bit dated and not at the top of
our reading list.

College Disrupted: The
Great Unbundling of
Higher Education
by Ryan Craig (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015).
This book
covers
much the
same
ground as
Kevin
­Carey’s The
End of College, yet from the perspective
not of a policy wonk but of the
managing director of a private
equity fund (University Ventures) that invests in “next
generation” higher education
companies. As Craig sees it,
the core problem for colleges
is how to deliver “high-return
programs” that solve the
problems of affordability, student learning, and fitness for
work. Within the next five
years, he predicts, a joinder of
online learning with competency-based education will
cut delivery costs by half. As
for unbundling, multiple college functions, including the
instructional, will fall to new
providers. (People don’t buy
albums anymore, they buy
individual songs; bundled
cable is being undone by Netflix and Amazon.)
Craig displays a spotty
knowledge of higher education, seldom mentions faculty
or students, has contempt for
collegiate boards not built to
ask fundamental questions,
and can ramble. The book’s
strength lies in its insider
knowledge of the hundreds
of new companies that will
compete for student attention
and institutional dollars. On

Appeared in the July/August 2015 issue of Trusteeship magazine.

that basis alone, it may be a
better bet for trustees than
Carey’s book.

Designing the
New American University
by Michael Crow and William
Dabars (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2015).
Since taking
the presidency at Arizona State
University,
Crow has
remade his
institution
into the nation’s largest public
university (86,000 students
and counting), embracing
growth on behalf of access,
achieving a student body that
reflects his state’s diversity,
hiking graduation rates,
­incubating dozens of new
enterprises, tripling industryrelevant research, reorganizing
faculties for transdisciplinary
impact, and embracing at
every turn digital technologies
and corporate partnerships to
control costs. His message:
Get clear about mission, serve
your publics, take risks, and
embrace change. This book
tells that story, albeit in sometimes heavy prose. (Parts of
the book appeared earlier in
academic publications.) It may
be a tough slog for busy board
members, but surely a read for
leaders of comprehensive
universities.

Remaking College: The
Changing Ecology of
Higher Education
by Michael Kirst and Mitchell
Stevens (Stanford University
Press, 2015).

T r u s t e e s h i p Reproduced with permission of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.
Copyright 2015 © All rights reserved. www.agb.org

This book
features 11
essays on
various of
today’s
moving
parts in
higher
education. Authors see a
familiar “system” of
campuses replaced by an
“ecology” of providers and a
consequent sharpening of
differences by age, class,
price, and geography. Thanks
to foundation support and a
series of author meetings,
this collection coheres and
breaks scholarly ground. The
intended audience is not so
much board members as
fellow scholars and policy
makers.

College (Un)Bound:
the Future of Higher
Education and What It
Means for Students
by Jeffrey Selingo (New
Harvest, 2013).
Selingo, a
long-time
reporter
and editor
of the
Chronicle of
Higher
Education,
takes us through the gamut of
troubles confronting
campuses today: ballooning
student debt (now $1.2
trillion), cratering state
support, the run-up in tuition
and discount rates, questions
about student learning and
job-readiness, and a widening
gap between the haves and
have-nots (think students and
institutions). To him, the

whole system is collapsing
under an unsustainable
financial model and will be
picked apart by a collection of
new, well-funded providers.
Selingo has a journalist’s eye
for detail and story; he
includes telling accounts of
the “amenities race” among
institutions, a shift in power
from faculty to students, and
the dumbing down of
undergraduate studies. An
enlightening read—only
slightly dated by events—that
is near the top of our reading
list.

Other Relevant Titles

Higher Education
in America
by Derek Bok (Princeton
University Press, 2013; revised
edition 2015).
During his
Harvard
University
presidency
(1971–91),
Bok
produced a
string of
influential essays and has
since written important books
on undergraduate education,
racial preference in
admissions, and university
marketplaces. Here, in 412
authoritative pages, Bok looks
across the board at higher
education as a system, its
governance, goals,
competitors, collegiate
function, professional
schools, research
commitments, and the
trajectory of it all. Bok
dismisses bogus criticisms
about costs, faculty,

governance, and board
members. He identifies the
university’s central weakness:
undergraduate education in
which too few graduate and
too many learn too little. A
beautifully written,
thoroughly informed, critical
yet hopeful book, for board
members of traditional
institutions with the time to
read deeply.

Higher Education
in the Digital Age
by William Bowen (Princeton
University Press, 2013; revised
paperback 2014, with updates
by the author and a new
foreword by Kevin Guthrie).
Like Derek
Bok, Bowen,
the former
Princeton
University
and Andrew
W. Mellon
Foundation
president, is one of the
academy’s invaluable
citizen-sages. This short,
incisive book is built around
Bowen’s lectures at Stanford
University in 2012, mostly
about what we know and
don’t know about online
learning, with responses
from Stanford’s president
John Hennessy, Harvard’s
Howard Gardner, Columbia
University’s Andrew
Delbanco, and Coursera’s
Daphne Kollar…with
responses in turn from
Bowen.
What we seem to know (so
far) is that online instruction
can work with reasonably
prepared and motivated
students taking carefully

crafted courses with adequate
support structures on topics
with right or best answers
(like statistics). But there’s a
lot we don’t know yet, and it
will take time and money to
get this right; when we do,
IT-based approaches may
eventually help rein in costs.
In short: a succinct treatment
of a crucial topic for (at
least) board members on an
academic affairs committee.

College: What It Was,
Is, and Should Be
by Andrew Delbanco
(Princeton University Press,
2012, with a new preface
2013).
Delbanco, a
gifted
teacher at
Columbia
University,
is well
aware of the
academy’s
competitive challenges but
offers a conservative counter
argument: “The biggest
innovation we could make
would be to retrieve [our]
fundamental values and
renew our commitment to
them.” Jobs are important,
but a college education
should help a student find
self-knowledge, become a
reflective citizen, connect
disparate knowledge, imagine
perspectives other than one’s
own, and take ethical
responsibility. This is said in
177 eloquent pages that
might be valuable reading for
any trustee, but especially for
those who oversee academic
affairs. —T.J.M.

Appeared in the July/August 2015 issue of Trusteeship magazine.
Reproduced with permission of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.
J U LY/AU G U S T 2 0 1 5
Copyright 2015 © All rights reserved. www.agb.org

15

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