Ed Reform In the University Part 5
Conclusion: Higher Ed, Business and Society in a Codependent Knowledge and Problem-solving Based Future
I would return to Hoxby’s underlying idea: education is an investment that yields value. All education models need to address their value proposition. We don’t have to focus simply on monetary value or business needs. A better model is Dewey’s idea of students as participants in communities of inquiry. It is important to demonstrate how a university education creates a return on investment; for the university, for the nation and especially for the individual.
Let’s consider another side of this discussion. Is business adequate for our economic future. If the economy provides little opportunity for college graduates, is that the fault of the university. It wasn’t that long ago that Peter Drucker’s phrase, the knowledge worker, was on everyones lips. Today we don’t hear so much about that anymore, but the issues he wrote about are just as relevant today. Let’s look again as Rick Wartzman quotes Drucker as follows:
“Every few hundred years throughout Western history, a sharp transformation has occurred,” Peter Drucker observed in a 1992 essay for Harvard Business Review. “In a matter of decades, society altogether rearranges itself — its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its arts, its key institutions. Fifty years later a new world exists. And the people born into that world cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born. Our age is such a period of transformation.”
Wartzman goes on to focus on six things that that should be at the front of transformation. This is my interpretation:
- Master the analytics of data analytics. This is the idea that information is the currency of business, but not just any information. Data is over-abundent. It exists in forms and from sources that, until recently, were hard to imagine. But the key is getting the analytics right. Productively frame the right information is a core business process and not something that can be outsourced to programmers. Big Data needs its own analytic frameworks and sophisticated models different from binary choice the industrial age methods that still dominate much of our thinking. Data should be developed as a method of reflection and clarification. Instead of looking for the right answers, achieve clarification on the right decisions.
- Prune aspects of the business that aren’t driving the future bringing us back to Daniel Little’s question that began this analysis. What is needed not just for now, but for the future. Resources are not unlimited, analytics are the key, but it cannot be based in a behaviorist pedagogy and psychology that contributes mostly to confusion.
- Make knowledgeable employees your core strength and give them the autonomy and accountability to act. Don’t make this an individualist proposition; Something found in students and employees. Instead make it be a call for the development of communities of inquiry. Hierarchical organizational principles have mostly been found wanting. The alternative are communities of practice founded in the spirit of inquiry.
- Build new intellectual and networked architectures to support true learning organizations; communities of pragmatic inquiry.
- Build engagement in employee by activating their values and their sense of purposes.
- Look beyond shareholders toward building a sustainable economy that works for all. Wartzman quoting Drucker: “A healthy business cannot exist in a sick society.”
Everyone of these suggestion are pointing us toward Dewey’s vision. Education is a lifelong endeavor to develop and support communities of inqury. The university can be the hub and source of such communities, but only if it promotes an appropriate view of inquiry and scholarship. It is quite different from the credentialing of graduates. Knowledge has a shelf life. Skills and the ability to engage with communities of inquiry prepares students for a lifetime.
