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That may be pragmatic, but it’s also disappointing. I would like to see Massachusetts emerge as a leader in the new model for delivering college degrees at much lower prices. We also need to experiment with fresh thinking about how to increase graduation rates; even in schools like the five schools we’re talking about, only 68 percent of first-degree students graduate after six years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Would such a radical change come from the campuses of MIT, Harvard, or Tufts? I doubt it, though some of the new concepts might take advantage of some of the online courses they’ve created, or even use an existing college campus during later times of the year. Have you ever seen a college where 100 percent of the classrooms and laboratories are used seven days a week, all year round? I think we need more educational revolutionaries in our city—and more focus on what they’re trying to do, rather than the latest college presidential election.
“What’s weird is that higher education is different from other industries, because there’s a bias towards never changing anything,” said Michael Larsson, president of Duet, a Boston nonprofit that awards associate and bachelor’s degrees in partnership with Southern New Hampshire University. “The older, the better. If you think about other sectors, no one will say, ‘We have to keep our hospitals the way they were in Oxford in 1500.’”
Duet, celebrating its eighth anniversary this year, advances the kind of innovation we need more of: It combines online courses offered by Southern New Hampshire University Online with face-to-face or virtual “training support” on enrollment, balancing life with school, and planning. career. It offers a limited number of degrees in areas such as health care management and communications. And the price for four years of education is less than $19,000 if a student pays himself; which drops to $260 if a student qualifies for a Pell grant from the federal government. And the Duet model offers students the ability to earn unlimited credits each semester, so early graduation is a possibility for students with sufficient free time. Instead of a sprawling green campus, Duet rents a small office downtown that students can use for study rooms or hands-on training sessions.
A paper published last fall by Harvard’s Kennedy School found that Duet’s approach, based on the first 554 students enrolled, “achieved a graduation rate more than twice the Massachusetts state average” and “eliminated the race-based college completion gap.” (The study looked at students pursuing an associate’s degree, not a bachelor’s.)
Chris Gabrieli, co-founder of the nonprofit Transforming Education and chair of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, noted that UMass last year acquired Brandman University, a private school with campuses in California and Washington. That, he said, could prove a “bold step” in helping more adult students earn degrees from associate’s up through doctorate, with a mix of online and in-person class options. Gabrieli says it leverages the UMass brand and has similar potential to Manchester, NH-based SNHU Online to reach tens of thousands of students worldwide. (SNHU says it serves more than 135,000 students online at any given time. Compare that scale to 5,900 students at Emerson.)
What other “blank paper” ideas can we try? How about taking advantage of empty downtown office space for classes or rotating students through a traditional campus environment in a month or two of on-campus assignments — what educators call the “low residency” model — to get the best out of online, combined with the benefits of the project. team-based and hands-on class discussions. Larsson at Duet suggests starting a small, very focused college: maybe everyone gets a double degree in business and English, and “all academic, operations, housing, and career support” will be aligned around that. “Even a club can be limited in scope but truly extraordinary—like the biggest and loudest intramural basketball league, and a great theater program.”
Robert Johnson, president of Western New England University in Springfield, said a new approach to higher education might “reach out to high school, and model where students take college courses early,” as a pathway to earning a degree in less than four years. . many years.
“You need to do selective innovation, experimentation, and entrepreneurship, not be bound by all the traditions of how an institution has done things over the last hundred years,” says Johnson. But when I came up with an innovative approach to hiring professors that tackled some of the challenges of underpaid adjunct professors and tenure systems, Johnson’s mild response was: “You could write that Robert Johnson didn’t say anything about tenure.”
Michael Horn, co-author of the book Disrupting Class and a lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, says there’s great potential in combining different modes of learning with on-the-job internships. He cites models such as the Quantic School of Business, the “mobile-first” executive MBA, and the Minerva Project, a San Francisco startup focused on new types of online learning, as well as the ways that companies such as Amazon Web Services and Walmart are creating training programs for them. workers needed. “You could try a model where you study for three years, and for one year you get credit for an internship,” says Horn, or a company that will hire people full-time while they continue their learning.
As one example, he cites Reach University, part of Oxford Teachers College, where “you get credit, and work in the classroom while you earn your degree.” (Reach says the average student pays $900 per year as they work toward a college degree, incurring no student debt.)
“We didn’t create enough newcomers in higher education to be able to rethink the model,” Horn said. “I wonder if we can change the conversation here, and make it not just about the crown jewel of Massachusetts,” but more about making degrees more accessible to a wide range of students.
One room to watch: Last year, Harvard and MIT sold edX, the online learning platform they built, to public education technology company, 2U, in a deal worth $800 million. At least part of the money will be donated to a new nonprofit called The Center for Reimagining Learning. The center hasn’t said much about its mission or activities other than that it “focuses on closing learning gaps and opportunities.”
For more than 400 years, Massachusetts has been great at creating high-educated luxury brands. The new presidents at MIT, Harvard, Tufts, and others will work hard to keep them. But what if we also tried to create a Target or Trader Joe’s education — offering good quality at a lower price?
Scott Kirsner can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottKirsner.
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