We need to reimagine higher education, not just repair it

“America is in crisis. Employers say paradoxically they cannot find the right people to fill jobs even though the country is facing its highest unemployment rates in a generation. Competition with a rising China and India and their vast populations lends urgency to the need for the country as a whole to do a better job of educating its citizens.”

The COVID crisis is wreaking havoc with the student experience and higher education institutions around the world. Colleges and universities shifted to remote learning as they were forced to suddenly shut down. Now students and lecturers are anxiously waiting to find out if, when classes resume in September, they will be in person. At some United States colleges, students are staging tuition fee strikes in despair that their degree won’t be considered as valuable under the circumstances.

But we have been here before. The above quote was written in 2010, during the last global economic crisis, by Harvard University’s Clayton Christensen. Christensen called for “disruptive innovation” to sweep through American universities, arguing that the business model that brought them to global prestige was becoming fragile. His voice was one of many from a wide range of sectors making the case that higher education was in need of a significant transformation.

“The institutions to which the country would turn to help tackle this challenge – its colleges and universities – are facing a crisis of their own,” he wrote. “The institutions are now increasingly beset by financial difficulties, and the recent financial meltdown is but a shadow of what is to come.” Christensen died in January, just as his darkest prediction seemed about to come true.

Did higher education heed the warning?

Higher education had 10 years after the financial crisis to make meaningful reforms. Some, and this in my view was a positive thing on balance, turned to partnering with other institutions. At Qatar Foundation, where I now work, we host branch campuses of some of the best universities in the US and elsewhere, combining best-in-class programmes in politics, international relations, media, medicine, business, the arts and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).

Such clusters can be found in other places such as Atlanta, where the consortium, including Spelman and Morehouse, allows students to cross-register for classes and curate their own education, or Amherst where the Five College Consortium offers combined degrees to students at no extra cost.

Also, intriguing disruptive innovation in education has been implemented in recent years in institutions which are challenging traditional assumptions and showing results, such as OP Jindal Global University in India, Arizona State University in the USA, University of the People, Higher School of Economics in Russia and even my own alma mater, the University of San Luis Potosi in Mexico.

Globally, in recent years, some universities ran experiments with MOOCs (massive open online courses) and some offered limited remote online summer classes.

Those experiments may have helped many institutions make the nearly overnight switch to remote teaching to enable continuity of learning, but for sure, something that quickly was learned is that these are not permanent solutions.

Merely taking an existing course and putting lectures onto Zoom isn’t the kind of fundamental change Christensen was talking about. “Plugging a disruptive innovation into an existing business model never results in transformation of the model,” he wrote in 2011. “Instead, the existing model co-opts the innovation to sustain how it operates.”

Thinking outside the box

Radical ideas for fundamental business model change did emerge. The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford imagined the ‘Open Loop University’. Instead of a four-year degree course starting at 18 for a few, it promised six years over a lifetime, where constant acquisition of new skills enables the frequent career pivots people would need. University would be more like a Netflix subscription and less like buying a house.

Beth Akers and Stuart Butler from the Brookings Institution argued that college should come with a “money back guarantee” as a market-based solution to temper skyrocketing costs and student debt.

In some countries, income-contingency loans were enacted as a way to link repayments to future employment. Even in the US some institutions at a certain point offered to repay loans for graduating students not landing a job, or to provide them with additional free education if no job was available at graduation.

Of course, in the midst of the pandemic crisis and skyrocketing unemployment levels, those promises are gone.

No one tried to seriously build these new business models, however, at least at existing major institutions. Maybe the ideas seemed too fanciful. Or just too hard.

Andrew Yang used his recent presidential campaign as a platform to argue for ‘Universal Basic Income’ (UBI). Automation and AI (artificial intelligence) were about to shred the social contract by destroying the employment prospects of the working and middle class; government would need to provide no-strings cash to individuals for life.

Many thought it was fantasy. “The Robot Apocalypse Has Been Postponed”, scoffed Ross Douthat in the New York Times.

Just weeks after Yang ended his campaign, the COVID pandemic triggered a global lockdown and economic crash and UBI became not a sci-fi policy dream but policy in dozens of countries, including the United States.

What does change mean?

Crises can make innovations that seemed previously impossible suddenly inevitable. There will be years of ‘a reckoning’ that higher education institutions will go through. But the ‘new normal’ we must shape needs to begin with the recognition that putting classes on Zoom isn’t change.

Higher education institutions need reimagining, not just repairing. Educators, policy-makers, employers and investors must urgently give thought to what a post-COVID world should look like and what role higher education institutions must play to make that world a reality.

The Qatar Foundation recently sponsored the Economist Intelligence Unit to produce “New Schools of Thought: Innovative models for delivering higher education”. We hope you will read it and join us in thinking about what innovations could look like as we look beyond the COVID-19 crisis. This time, we in higher education cannot afford to let the opportunity pass.

Francisco Marmolejo is the education advisor of Qatar Foundation, based in Doha. Previously, he served as global higher education coordinator of the World Bank, and as lead education specialist in India and South Asia. E-mail: fmarmolejo@qf.org.qa, Twitter: @fmarmole. This article was first published in Forbes magazine.