Facing the Future: The Urgent Need for Innovation in Higher Education
Q&A with Brian Rosenberg
Brian Rosenberg is currently President-in-Residence at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. From 2003 until 2020, he served as the 16th President of Macalester College. Mr. Rosenberg is a Senior Advisor to The African Leadership University whose mission is to put excellent education within reach of the next generation of African leaders. His new book, “WHATEVER IT IS, I’M AGAINST IT: Resistance to Change in Higher Education”, published in September 2023 by Harvard Education Press.
Susan Fine: Your new book, “WHATEVER IT IS, I’M AGAINST IT: Resistance to Change in Higher Education,” is quite an attention-grabber. How does it reflect on academia's attitude towards change?
Brian Rosenberg: With apologies to The Marx Brothers, it neatly captures academia's long-standing aversion to change. Groucho Marx played a college president and joyously sang about his resistance to whatever came his way – in the 1930s. The book tries to explain why higher education has been called – I think, accurately – the most change resistant of our major industries.
When something is as resistant to change as American higher education, the explanation can't lie in individual personalities. I look for the structural and cultural reasons why the higher education industry is so resistant to change, and why even slow, incremental change is so difficult.
Fine: Why is there an immediate need for change in higher education? Is it purely financial? What other factors contribute to the crisis?
Rosenberg: At the heart of the higher ed problem is an unsustainable financial model. Take out of the equation the 100+ U.S. colleges and universities whose finances make them, if not immune, at least quite insulated from financial stress. They are the outliers.
Looking beyond these exceptions, you see a landscape of 4,000 colleges and universities worrying about filling their classes and balancing their budgets. They offer a product that is too expensive, and whose costs are going up more rapidly than the willingness and ability of people to pay. So far, we have found no way to reduce the cost of that product, or to even slow the rate of increase in the cost of that product.
And parents aren’t willing to pay. Private colleges need to discount their tuition, on average, 56% to fill their classrooms. And that discount has been growing. When I started as President of Macalester, the average discount rate nationally was closer to 40%. Private, higher education in the U.S. is on sale for more than half off. It is the equivalent of Nordstrom Rack.
Project that over another 10 years. Can you have a discount rate of 65%? At what point are you discounting so much that it is not economically sustainable?
On top of this, there is a shrinking market of students coming out of high school. And a smaller percentage of those high school graduates are electing to go to college. We face a demographic cliff this decade where the number of high school graduates is dropping by 15%.
Yet no one really wants to do anything dramatic to confront it.
Finally, there is the loss of public confidence in higher education. Higher education used to be among the most respected industries in the country. That is no longer the case. That's not good. Your target customers are the ones with the least faith in your product.
Some of that drop in public confidence is politically motivated, but some stems from evidence of ineffectiveness of a lot of what higher education is trying to do. People are starting to question how much our students actually learn at our colleges.
Fine: How have colleges responded to this crisis?
Rosenberg: The typical response of colleges has been to cut programs and to discount prices.
Very few businesses have ever cut their way to greater success. You don't draw more students by cutting lots ofprograms. And you don't get financial sustainability by just putting what you're offering on sale at a higher and higher discount. At the heart of this crisis is economics.
Fine: Why is higher education so resistant to change?
Rosenberg: First is the lack of the right incentive system, of a constituency that benefits from change. People don't like change. Change is hard. There's lots of research to show that, given their druthers, people would rather not change in dramatic ways. You tend to need extrinsic sources to create motivation for change. If you look at the key players within higher education, none of them really has an extrinsic motivation to promote change.
Why aren’t the presidents changemakers? Every job description for a new president asks for a change agent. But after they get the job, presidents are not incentivized to be disruptive because they're going to lose their job. Presidential life cycles are getting shorter and shorter. Disruptive presidents tend not to last very long. The incentive if you're a president is to stay in your lane, not to make any constituency too angry, and hope you can hold on as long as you can.
Next, tenured faculty are probably the least incentivized workers to push for dramatic change. If you're a 60-year-old tenured faculty member, even at a struggling institution, your calculation is probably to wait it out until retirement.
Third, Boards of Trustees of private institutions love their schools. But it's not their full-time job. They want to make sure that the institution is running effectively but have no real incentive to push for dramatic change.
Students will push for change, but not to the fundamental educational model. Students typically push for change on social justice issues or issues that are personally relevant to them.
And the groups that are most incentivized to push for change are the ones with the least power to accomplish it: non-tenure track faculty members, staff, and graduate students, who have no real place in the shared governance system of universities.
So, no influential stakeholders have an incentive to push change.
Fine: What else contributes to this allergy to change in higher education?
Rosenberg: I would point to the governance structure. Shared governance works on the assumption that there is a set of shared interests and a willingness among the key parties to work collaboratively together: the Board of Trustees, the President, and the faculty. Shared governance works on a consensus model that takes an enormous amount of time; it tends to sift out any of the most transformational ideas. This often leads to strategic plans that are measured not in terms of their actual strategy, but in terms of how many people participated in their creation.
And as controversial as this is to say, tenure contributes to this issue. I was a tenured faculty member and believed with all my heart that I deserved tenure. It was a just reward for all my work. I also get why if you have tenure, you don't want to give it up. What group with privilege ever wants to give up that privilege? Yet, if you hire someone to teach 18th century British literature in 1985, you probably still have someone who's teaching 18th century British literature today, whether there's any student who wants to take that course.
The result is colleges trying to be all things to all people. If you look at small American colleges, they each offer 35 or 40 majors, and they’re more or less the same at each school. That’s crazy. If you read the websites of American colleges, you would think we have 4,000 colleges that are completely unique in their culture and their offerings, when in fact, they're all trying to do the same stuff.
The amount of redundancy built into the system is extraordinary. In Vermont they just combined seven community colleges, but they have not yet done the hard part of whittling seven registrars down to one. We’ve all seen the kinds of pushback that arises when a school actually tries to reduce the number of faculty and staff to make financial sense.
Will we ever figure out a way to right-size for the student population going forward? I don't know. Basically, incentives, shared governance, tenure, and the redundancy that there are too many colleges doing the same thing are the major factors.
Fine: You have suggested some radical changes to the traditional model, and even wrote about some in an article you did for this publication in 2020 called “What American Higher Education Can Learn From Africa.” Could you share these?
Rosenberg: The education these colleges provide is a good education, but it could be better. A couple of examples. The in-person lecture has been one of the primary modes of teaching going back to the Middle Ages. Yet, there is lots of evidence about how people learn that suggests that lecturing is spectacularly ineffective. People don't retain what they hear in a lecture with 500 other people. Given what it costs, putting a faculty member in a room with students should be about more than lecturing. A lecture can be online. A decade ago, a math faculty member at Macalester began putting his lectures online for students to watch before class. He was then able to spend class time on the material the students did not grasp. More of that would make education much, much better.
Next, I would change the academic calendar in the United States. Students have up to five weeks off in the winter and another three months in the summer. For a third of the year, this extraordinarily expensive physical plant is sitting unused. I don't know of any other industry that makes such inefficient use of such an expensive resource. There's an enormous opportunity cost of keeping students in college for four years instead of three, which could easily be changed by shortening the breaks.
Finally, and controversially, I question whether combining research and teaching at most institutions is the right model. It's a model that was imported from Germany in the 19th century to large universities and then to colleges, where faculty members are expected to teach and be productive scholars or scientists. However, there's no evidence that active researchers are better teachers, and research takes away significant time that could be dedicated to teaching.
Research is important. Teaching is really important. Should hundreds of colleges be trying to do both functions at a high level? I'm not convinced. If colleges focused on being teaching institutions, it would also take away one of the main arguments for long breaks; faculty members need research time to get tenure.
The interesting thing about higher education is, you can’t even talk about these things.
Fine: When you talk about bending the cost curve, aren’t you implying students should spend more time online? Isn't there a loss to some aspects of the college experience through online learning?
Rosenberg: We’re currently experiencing two extremes: the unsustainable costly traditional model and online education, which is often ineffective due to low completion rates and the isolation it imposes on students.
We are increasingly learning what does and does not work about online learning and what is necessary for community building. We should experiment with hybrid models where we use online resources to deliver basic information and time spent together to build community and to teach the soft skills we hope students will learn at university.
Fine: How has the changing nature of the college age population affected the problem?
Rosenberg: Higher education from its inception was designed to educate an elite population, whether elite meant the moneyed class, or a meritocracy theoretically created by the SAT. It was never designed to provide broad education to the populace. In the 19th century United States, if you went to college, you were white and male, with rare exceptions.
The college population is becoming less and less white, because the U.S. population is becoming less and less white. And the college-age population is less and less affluent because wealth has been concentrated among fewer and fewer people. There's a smaller middle class.
The population of students who go to college has changed. College can no longer cater solely to the affluent. But we have a model that is designed to be exclusive, expensive, and selective. That's not the population that higher education needs to serve right now.
Fine: Where will change come from?
Rosenberg: It is hard but not impossible to be optimistic. I do think that change will come because it must come. I see three potential sources to lead change.
One possibility is that private equity firms find profits in higher education, which is still 3% of GDP. They will offer degrees at a lower cost to make a profit, not necessarily to serve the public good.
Another source of external change is state legislatures, whether legislating what can be taught or refusing to fund tenure. This would clearly be a change for the worse.
Finally, change could come from an outside disrupter: the Clayton Christensen model. Christensen formulated the idea that legacy industries that refuse to change get disrupted from the outside. Look at tech: who would have believed 40 years ago that Apple would crush IBM. You have a few examples of new, disruptive models. Olin College of Engineering has no tenure and a much more experiential model of education. They have a rule that you can't teach the same elective course more than three times in a row. That's very cool.
Maybe foundations will encourage innovation. A lot of funders have stopped funding higher education, because they're tired of the lack of change. Maybe funders will start funding innovative higher ed startups that work on a new model.
Obviously, the best option is that it changes from within, that our institutions begin to innovate. Some really outstanding liberal arts colleges are hanging on by a thread and know that if they don't change, they won't be around.
Unfortunately, we have a history in the United States of waiting until things are at the brink before we address their problems: for example, our rail system or our infrastructure. We’re making the same mistake in higher education, waiting until it's on the verge of collapse before we take steps to address the problem.
Fine: What Is the call to action?
Rosenberg: First, as alumni, be open to change. Alumni need to be more receptive to change at their alma maters. They need to understand that the college experience they cherished must evolve and not threaten to withdraw their funding every time a college president needs to close a department. Being an alum or a trustee is not just about remembering the past, but about thinking of the current context and the future. What do we need to do to make sure we are serving students today and tomorrow, not as we did yesterday? A truism among college presidents is that for every alum, the ideal moment in the life of a college is when they attended.
If you are looking to get more directly involved, those with skill sets that have brought innovation to other industries could have a lot to teach higher education about how to innovate.
My call to action for people who are trustees or alumni of institutions is to think about tomorrow, not yesterday. We need to make sure we are serving tomorrow’s students.
About the Author:
Susan Fine met Professor Rosenberg in connection with teaching a course on entrepreneurship at African Leadership University (ALU) in Rwanda. ALU undergraduates declare a mission, not a major, and design their coursework and internships to prepare them to achieve these goals. For Susan, her one-month teaching at ALU was transformative. She was founder and CEO of Fine Development Partners, a real estate development firm active in New York City, and was a 2019 Fellow and 2020 Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.