D is for Disruption…
September 2021
Back in November 2019 I wrote:
What happens when an established higher ed brand — let’s say ASU — opens an Apple store-like presence for their local online students for advising, tech support, financial aid, everything but physical classrooms. Will local high schools students who recognize the brand but never considered applying due to distance and cost suddenly see an ASU degree as a realistic goal?
I think so. Imagine walking through a reopened urban retail mall filled with school storefronts…which schools will be there? Can schools afford not to be?
Well, I got this only partly right. Back then ASU was already developing a presence in Los Angeles, which is growing rapidly. Washington D.C. is next.
The university has filled out it’s Film/TV school in an old newspaper building downtown, and a law school also. These are completely in-person with all of the amenities of a traditional university.
Santa Monica College even touts their transferability with a page on the SMC website promoting ASU/LA info sessions. SMC has traditionally been known as a feeder to UCLA/USC and other prestigious LA-area schools.
So if you think your major public/flagship university in Austin, or Seattle, is safe, well…
ALSO: Southern New Hampshire University is acquiring microcredential provider Kenzi Academy to “bring higher education to learners who have often been left behind by traditional higher education,” said Paul LeBlanc, President and CEO, SNHU.
AND ALSO: edX, that super-MOOC built by MIT and Harvard and joined by many universities was just acquired by 2U for $800m. 2U is attempting to keep edX competitive with Coursera by injecting the underperforming platform with 2U’s OPM marketing muscle.
…
Okay Ken, get to the point. Here it is: The long-predicted disruption of higher ed is gathering speed. COVID-19 pushed it along, but these developments have less to do with remote vs. in-person. They are plays for scale. The heavyweights are flexing.
The big are getting bigger, many small schools are clinging to each other to create scale (if they’re lucky enough to find each other), and the medium-sized schools might be vulnerable as well. Small, sparsely-populated rural states are not replenishing their pool of young people who in the past could be counted to stay close to home when going away to school, so these schools (see below) will wither and disappear, unless they can survive the transition to micro-credentialing and upskilling, and away from 2- and 4-year degrees. From the edX/2U story:
The deal is a sign that the once-distinct lines between MOOCs, online degree programs and on-campus programs have blurred, argues Sean Gallagher, founder and executive director of Northeastern University’s Center for the Future of Higher Education and Talent Strategy.
“For me, the big story here is this continued consolidation of market leadership in online learning,” he added. “Scale matters, and the big are getting bigger.”
Here’s a thought experiment I keep thinking about: jump ahead 10 years from today and drop yourself into the body of a high school senior. Assume the growth of scale we’re seeing now has at minimum continued, with ASU dropping more mini-universities into metro areas, Amazon and others getting into the game, and many industries making accommodations for microcredentials to entry-level positions. Also assume the pace of tuition inflation at 4-year schools continues unabated.
Now look at your options, as that high school senior, and ask yourself if signing up for a four to six year degree feels as inevitable as it does to today’s seniors.
…C is for Consolidation
While ASU is making plans to steal your lunch money, Pennsylvania is accepting that the state can no longer support higher education at the level they used to. Six institutions are collapsing into two universities to achieve a more solid financial footing. How are they doing it?
Integrations means with three partner campuses — each maintaining their unique brand identities and on-campus educational and student life experiences — there will be a single administration, budget, unified faculty, and student information system, helping to put these institutions on more solid financial footing while expanding access to an increased number of programs across the institutions.
Pennsylvania has long struggled to sustain their robust system of state colleges and universities, so this isn’t news in the higher ed community, but that this is happening now, just as competition from lower-cost alternatives enter the market makes you wonder just how much more cutting is in each state’s future. PASSHE
And that other kind of disruption…
This story from July captures so much of what’s dysfunctional about the popular understanding of higher education in our communities today, and how constrained the leaders of these institutions are. The short version of this story: a local community college in Wyoming is struggling to reverse declining enrollment. The college’s leadership is fighting with the local community to chart a path forward that ensures solvency and even growth. Faced with declining state support and cratering enrollment, the college is looking at staff and service cuts to reconcile their reduced budget when the community steps in to…no, this isn’t one of those stories. It’s the other kind, where a few local concerned citizens step up to the podium to explain how the college’s leadership simply doesn’t understand how run a college.
“Status quo is no longer an option. We need to turn enrollment around,” Riley urged. She didn’t propose any specific ways for the college to address the problem.
Read the article to learn how the daughter of this woman proposes very specific ways to address the problem that involve her very own legal assistant course, taught for free, and many other status quo-busting ideas. Powell Tribune
trends
Reddit and “Chance Me”
From Campus Sonar, this blog post about prospective students reverse engineering a practice is fascinating on many levels. If you aren’t familiar, Reddit is an online community where members share information and ideas in an atypically civilized fashion, which is why high schoolers are increasingly dropping in to talk about their number one anxiety trigger: college admissions.
The practice that Stephen App (now at SimpsonScarborough) explores is the Chance Me post:
What is a “Chance Me” post? It includes a student sharing a post listing their academic merits, demographics, test scores, extracurricular activities, awards, letters of recommendation, etc., along with a simple question: “What are my chances of getting in?”
Stephen goes on to explain why admissions professionals are dismissive of the practice for reasons you can probably guess at.
Here’s where it gets fascinating. As Chance Me posts have fallen out of favor, they’re being replaced by Reverse Chance Me posts — students post all of their stats and extracurriculars, but leave out the schools they’re interested in, asking the community “where do I belong?” Community members offer suggestions and guidance without pressure, opening the vision of the OP.
What’s in it for you? As Stephen says: “At a minimum, Reverse Chance Me posts offer an incredible opportunity for free market research and competitive intelligence. You know, the kind that usually costs anywhere between a few pizzas and tens of thousands of dollars.”
