Universities Are Instructional Innovation Failures

Their most important product is prestige… and it’s getting stale.

This colorized woodcut from the 14th century shows the model of instruction on which the first universities were founded 500 years ago. Without a printing press to duplicate textbooks, a reader recited text to students who were are expected to copy the speech into their own version of the book. Nevertheless, some students in the back are shown falling asleep. Despite the invention of the printing press, the computer, the internet, virtual reality, and every other information communication technology known to humankind, this model of instruction still persists (except in my class, where no one ever falls asleep).

In The Secret of University Success, I wrote that universities (including my employer, Arizona State University) market prestige. Because universities are in the knowledge business, and it is so darn expensive to assess the quality of knowledge, the principal stakeholders that support universities use prestige as a proxy for quality of knowledge.

While this makes total sense from the perspective of evolutionary biology, given our hind brain tendency to learn by imitating the prestigious members of our “tribes” (Secret of Our Success, Henrich 2017) where it gets confusing in our post-tribal era is that prestige is conferred in so many ways that are unrelated to quality of knowledge. Certainly there are Nobel or other prestigious prize awards, or the popularity of publications, produced by the faculty, or the social signalling via strict admissions standards, or even the success of rich, famous, or otherwise successful alumni. But prestige can also be conferred by the success of student athletes, or even the wealth and fame attained by the students before they enrolled.

What I never explained in my previous article was how universities are able to turn prestige into revenues.