Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to speak to the Western New York Women’s Leadership Institute with Dr. Shirley Mullen of Houghton College and Dr. Dennis Hefner. Our topic was “The Future of Higher Education: Economic Stability and Student Success,” and given that each of us represented a very different higher education sector, our comments each echoed the same notions of institutional change and evolution. I share a version of my remarks below.
In leadership and management circles, it has become a bit trendy to toss out Clay Christensen’s observations about disruptive innovation: a disruption within “an industry that allows a whole new population of consumers access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill.” Our sector, community colleges, provides an example of a disruptive innovation within higher education. Students formerly excluded from college were provided a door of access, and the success of this disruptive innovation is evident in the data. Community colleges really did not proliferate in great numbers until the 1960s, yet just a half a century later, we account for 44% of all US undergraduate enrollment.
This sounds like a tried and true success story, and it is—in part. Yet, a tenet of disruptive theory is the notion that the path from being a disruptively innovative organization to being a more established conservative one can be quite short, and organizations that hold onto their old models in the face of new disruptive upstarts typically don’t have a long shelf life. (A glance around our region in this regard is quite telling.) The central issue is that established organizations hold onto beliefs about their audience/consumers long after these beliefs are no longer valid. As Christensen notes, disruptive innovations typically result in worse product performance, at least in the short term, but because they are generally "cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use" they build a significant market base below the radar of traditional companies. A perfect example in the consumer market might be the paradoxical success of the disposable razor—it may nick like crazy, but it is light, convenient, and cheap.
While we are certainly not in the disposable razor business, I would challenge you to think about this portrait of disruptive innovator vs. traditional stalwart in regards to higher education. For years, “establishment” higher education has cast aspersions on community colleges, concerns about the quality of open access when compared to highly selective. Students voted with their feet—and we grew. Now, think about ongoing discussions in our field about for profit colleges and online degree programs; the push for three year baccalaureate degrees; the growth of “degree packaging” for students with credits from multiple institutions; the overnight creation of professional or accelerated graduate programs; the promise for free education held out by Khan University or the just announced start-up that has grown out of Stanford’s online experiment. The same concerns the four-year sector has long voiced about community colleges are now being voiced by our institutions about the latest disruptors. Yet, keeping with historical precedent, these concerns (valid or otherwise) have not put much of a dent into enrollment at, for example, for profits. Each example above is a disruptive innovation that poses a considerable threat to the established way of doing things, and like disruptive innovations in other sectors, each offers access to a new audience (at the very time when our traditional audience may be shrinking). As a result, some community colleges have once more become disruptive innovators. The online giant Maricopa/Rio Salado in Arizona and the new fast-track CUNY community college are but two examples.
As we begin 2012 at MCC, I encourage you to think about what and how we might learn from these disruptive innovations … and how they might come to shape our college in the future. Please share your ideas on my blog as part of the discussion.
Anne Kress
President's Office
01/25/2012 |