“Unbundling” Would Indicate Failure of the University, Not Power of Technology
This Sept. 9, 2016 photo shows the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Conn. (AP Photo/Beth J. Harpaz)
RCEd Commentary
The university as we know it may be on the verge of unraveling.
Recently, entrepreneurs and education researchers have radically reimagined the higher education system, predicting that it will soon be “unbundled” into separate sets of services delivered by different providers. Instead of a four year degree at a college, these visionaries imagine students will partake in various skill-building activities through multiple institutions, using technology to build education more cheaply and flexibly than has ever been possible. Whether because of the disruptive power of technology or unsustainable higher education cost trends, the unbundlers are predicting the end of the university as we know it.
But is the unbundling of higher education really inevitable? And would it be a good thing?
While the higher education system is likely to go through real changes in the coming decades, there are powerful barriers to unbundling that the visionaries have so far mostly ignored. What’s more, they tend to neglect the great value of these institutions in their current form. The power of the unbundling argument comes not from the inevitability of technology to disrupt every industry, but from broadly held concerns about the costs and quality of the 21st century university.
The Great Unbundling
The unbundlers’ general argument is that universities have a few core roles, and in the future, these roles will be filled by a variety of service providers rather than a single university. As Learn Capital’s Michael Staton puts it in the film Ivory Tower, a college education can be broken down into three parts: 1) content (the stuff on the syllabus), 2) social networks (organizations, classrooms, Greek life, Dr. Pepper Hours, etc.), and 3) credentialing (the transcript and degree). For now these are bundled as “college,” but in the future they can be provided by an ad hoc assortment of educational institutions, competency-based credentials, social networking platforms, online discussion boards, tutoring, and other services we have yet to imagine.
But it simply isn’t true that a college education is just a bundle of a few discrete services. It is a cliché, of course, but many of the most transformative experiences for college students consist of things like after-class discussions, working with classmates on a capstone project, or being mentored by a faculty member, and these activities are not as easily siloed as the unbundlers believe. For students who benefit from living near classmates who are studying the same topics or who need the accountability of a professor who will notice if they skip class, the unbundled model may be quite inferior.
Oddly, the unbundlers have convinced themselves that the ersatz nature of the new unbundled products is actually a virtue. Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation predicts that, much like Japanese cars or transistor radios before them, the new unbundled products may be inferior now, but over time they will improve and eventually displace the old ones. This theory misses a couple of important things about education which distinguish it from other “industries.” For one, the shortcomings of the low-end universities to which they compare the unbundled products should be viewed as problems to be addressed, not models to be scaled. More importantly, the complex sets of skills implied by a college degree are not easily validated. Much of what gives universities their value is that they are the only institutions society views as credible to judge complex forms of student learning not easily captured by narrow measures. In this respect, a college education is much different than other “products.”
Is Our College Students Learning?
While Christensen’s theory seems to predict the unfolding of a natural process, an influential white paper by two American Enterprise Institute scholars argues for specific policies to encourage the unbundling. Specifically, they advocate deregulation of higher education and increased ability to apply federal financial aid dollars to unbundled educational services. To ensure quality, they suggest regulating education services based on “outcomes rather than the act of delivery.” But which outcomes should be used to judge educational services? Putting to the side their suggestions of using program completion and student economic outcomes, we are left with judging student learning outcomes. Easier said than done.
The unbundlers take it as a given that a bachelor’s degree in, say, Civil Engineering or East Asian Studies is fundamentally decomposable into discrete competencies that can be independently and validly assessed. Yet when you consider that very few people outside a given field understand those competencies, it’s clear that there are powerful incentives for institutions to validate something that looks to an outsider like a strong indication of learning outcomes, but in reality is easy for the student to produce. This incentive for institutions to cheat is part of why for-profit educators are viewed with so much suspicion in the first place: without a longstanding commitment to high academic standards, institutions are tempted to become diploma mills, taking in the money and churning out the degrees.
In all the talk about the need for reform, the unbundlers ignore the value of America’s universities as they are. The U.S. so thoroughly dominates the global higher education “industry” because when it comes to certifying that a person has a foundation to begin life as a productive citizen, America’s higher education institutions are simply peerless. It is very hard to imagine that someday soon, society will decide that a set of micro-badges from a specialized for-profit company will carry the same weight as a bachelor’s degree from an accredited institution does today.
It’s Not Really about Technology
The unbundlers tell a story about technology, but the rhetorical power of their argument comes from troubling trends within the American higher education system itself. If car prices rose at the rate of college tuition over the past decades, Paul Campos wrote in a New York Times opinion piece last year, “the average new car would cost more than $80,000.” During the same decades of skyrocketing costs, syllabuses have shortened and grading standards have slackened, prompting doubts about the value of what students are getting for all that money. If not for what has been happening within the academy itself, few would take the unbundling argument seriously.
If the problem mainly comes from within the higher education system, rather than policies meant to catalyze the unbundling of our universities, a better approach may be to promote policies that encourage colleges and universities to do better. Some institutions are already making some smart changes on their own, such as leveraging the campus community to promote personal accountability and proactively demystifying financial aid, a step towards slowing cost growth. But they must do more. To improve affordability, these institutions must adopt technology strategically, for example by broadening the availability of credit-by-exam in amenable fields (i.e., not for classes like English composition), so that students can earn inexpensive credit toward a traditional degree by demonstrating competencies acquired through non-traditional means. And to fend off disruption, they must preserve the values that made them great in the first place: high standards, intellectual rigor, and dynamic academic community.
If the university unbundles, it will happen because of the profligate spending – the extravagant sports complexes, ballooning administrator salaries, luxury dorms, and various infrastructure boondoggles – occurring at the same time that the institutions debase the bachelor’s degree by abandoning rigorous standards. If the university unbundles, it will be because of these self-inflicted wounds, not because technology has made college obsolete.
