Michael D. Smith | Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World | Talks at Google

foreign [Music] I'm the chief Economist here at Google and it's a great pleasure to introduce my colleague and friend uh Michael Smith and he's going to tell us about how to reform the university now this question of reforming the university has been going on for the last thousand years or so so we'll be very interested in hearing what Michael has to say and how we can join the 21st and 22nd century so let me turn that over to Michael can we go back to his there he is yeah and we have been friends for many years and I was uh Mike was previously on the books that Google show when was that four years ago five years ago yeah 2015 oh wow yeah of talking about his book which was titled streaming sharing and stealing and was all about the Uproar in the content markets uh brought about by digitization and copyright issues so this is a totally new topic but maybe you can start us into a presentation and afterwards we'll have some some questions and answers so Michael turn that over to you fantastic thanks Hal um yeah let's so here's here's the presentation I'll try to spend about 25 minutes given a an overview of the thoughts in this book and then how I look forward to uh interacting with you and the other folks who are who are on this on the call um so let me start the the title of the book is the Abundant University remaking higher education for a digital world and what I'm going to try to try to argue in this in this book is I'm going to try to make three arguments to my colleagues in higher education number one is new digital technologies will change higher education regardless of what we've heard I think we're at that point um number two is I think if we care even half as much about social justice as we say we do we should want to embrace this change and then number three is I think we have a way to embrace this change by rediscovering our mission as Educators so let me start let me start at the top technology will change higher education when when I say this in faculty audiences I frequently get eye rolls um and a lot of the eye rolls say you know what we've heard this uh We've we've heard this ever since like clay Christensen said it in 2013. um so this is Clay Christensen in many ways the father of disruptive change theory in 2013 saying higher education is just on the edge of the crevasse five years from now these Enterprises are going to be in real trouble um it's 10 years from now nothing's really changed so clearly higher education doesn't face a threat from disruption I'm going to try to argue that's the wrong way of thinking about that and I'm going to argue respectfully clay christensen's theory is brilliant but it's not the only theory of how Technologies change uh change Industries um why do I say that well I say that because of a lot of the research my colleague Rahul and I did in the book Hal mentioned um a lot of that research was motivated by this and similar quotes we heard from leaders in the entertainment industry so this is a quote from Big Six Studio executive who came to Rahul in my class in 2015 and talked about how technology was changing his business but during the Q a Time Rahul asked him hey are you at all worried about the threat that Amazon and Netflix and Google might pose to your dominance in the industry and he said you know what my business is different same-six Studios have dominated my industry for the last hundred years there's a reason for that and by implication that's not going to change and Rahul and I found that very interesting and actually even more interesting because when we tried to apply Professor christensen's Theory again respectfully to entertainment what we realized is Professor christensen's theory is based on a single disruptive change and the entertainment industry was facing multiple disruptive changes and so the theory didn't work all that well to explain what we saw going on and so we developed a theory that I'm going to call structural disruption and in this Theory to think about whether technology is going to change the industry you need to step back and think about what's defined power so the the executive was right the same six Studios had dominated his industry for the last hundred years um and it's not like the internet was the first technological shift they'd faced they'd faced massive technological shifts in every aspect of how content was created distributed and consumed and yet none of those shifts had changed the industry why was that um and what we're holding I tried to argue was well it was because those six Studios controlled three key scarce resources they controlled scarcity in the financial and Technical Resources you needed to make content they controlled scarcity and access to the distribution of promotional channels you need to get your odd your content in front of audiences and then they were able to use copyright to create an artificial scarcity and how consumers gained access to content and none of the technological shifts they'd faced over the last hundred years had changed the importance of any of those sources of scarcity but in 2015 what we argue is they were facing a set of simultaneous technological shifts which were creating abundance in each of these sources of scarcity while at the same time creating a new scarce resource let's call it customer attention that was controlled by oh by the way Amazon Netflix and Google all right fun story what the heck does that have to do with with education um at the beginning of the pandemic I heard the then president of Ohio State Michael Drake get asked almost the same question about the about education um basically does online education threaten the power of traditional uh universities and this is what he actually said but what I heard him say was you know what my industry is different the same 62 universities have dominated my industry for the last 500 years there's a reason for that and that's not going to change um and again that got me thinking you know why have a small number of universities dominated the powerful position and positions in higher education for 500 years and what I'm trying to argue in the book is that we in higher education control our own three scarce resources we control access scarce access to the seats in the classroom we control scarcity and access to faculty experts and we control scarcity and access to the valuable credentials you need to succeed in the marketplace what happened in 2012 around the time clay Christensen was saying higher education is going to change is moocs and other online learning Technologies we're creating abundance in access to the classroom seats and access to faculty what they weren't changing though however I'm going to argue is scarcity and access to the credentials you can take as many mooc courses as you want you can take as many courses on edx as you want you can learn as much as you want but unless you have that credential it's not going to get you very far in the marketplace could that change and I'm going to argue I think it already is so here's a slide with a bunch of headlines from a bunch of different news articles all all reporting on companies saying we're de-emphasizing our Reliance on the college degree in terms of who we hire if that Domino Falls if we create alternate ways for students to gain access to the professional Workforce I think we're going to face a significant change in um in the market for higher education and so that's kind of how I started the book about halfway through writing the book what I realized is I don't think that's that's the real story here real story is in technological change the real story is we in higher education should want to embrace this change um why do I say that I say that because one of the key missions of higher education is creating abundant access to people regardless of your socioeconomic background and this goes all the way back to the Truman commission's report in 1947. so this is a quote from the Truman commissions report the Democratic Community cannot tolerate a society based on education for the well to do alone if College opportunities are restricted to those in the higher income brackets the way is open to the creation and perpetuation of a class society which has no place in the American way of life right inspiring words it's 70 years later how well are we doing and I'm gonna I'm gonna argue we're not doing well at all right so this is a a study done by Raj Chetty and his colleagues that found that if you're a child born into a family in the top one percent of the income distribution you've got a one in four chance of going to a highly selective College if you're a kid born in the bottom 20 of the income distribution you've got a one in 300 chance of going to the same college now I'm trained as an economist which means I believe in the efficient allocation of scarce resources if we in higher education genuinely believe that rich kids just happen to be 77 times more likely to be capable of an Elite Education than we're doing just fine in how we allocate access to the scarce resource of elite higher education but if we don't believe that and I don't know anyone who does then this is a terrible way of allocating access to the scarce resources and we ought to be ashamed of ourselves and I'm I'm I mean I'm saying that quite seriously um we ought to be desperately looking for ways to create more access for kids who just happen to grow up in the wrong ZIP code a lot of my colleagues at this point push back and say well Mike you're only talking about Elite schools right let's let's talk about the whole of higher education I'll have two responses to that the first is that what we know is the elite schools actually give you a whole lot more value in the in the work Market than than non-elite schools right if you graduate from Harvard your opportunities are a whole lot better than if you graduate from and I won't mention anyone by name um that's the first problem the second problem is even if you look across higher education we're not doing all that well in terms of creating Equity you know kids born into wealth are a whole lot more likely to to graduate from a four-year School than kids who are born into poverty that's a real problem so much of a problem that the Press has started to notice so this is an article in the New York Times the New York Times um titled let's smash the college admissions process that argues that the college admissions process has morphed into one of the truly destructive institutions in American society that's that's a that's a big problem and I think something we should want to solve and that brings us back to this chart right what I said is unless employers change their behavior our business model is going to be just fine um the reason I chose these these press reports is that in each of these press reports is a quote from someone in a um in a business saying we're de-emphasizing the four-year degree because we want to achieve a more diverse Workforce and we've discovered that we can achieve the diversity we want if we continue to rely on four-year degrees in in the hiring process just think about that for a second right evil capitalists saying I want to create more diversity in my Workforce and I can't do that if I continue to rely on the noble people in higher education um I think that ought to wake us up a little bit at this point a lot of my colleagues say well this is actually a problem of the government you know if we could get more Democrats elected to public office then the Progressive Party will give us as much money as we want and all of our problems will be solved I'm not sure I buy that um thank you and I'm not sure I buy that in large part because President Barack Obama who if I remember correctly was a Democrat um said in his 2012 State of the Union Address it's not enough for the federal government to increase student aid we just we can't just keep subsidizing skyrocketing tuition we'll run out of money so let me put colleges and universities on notice if you can't stop tuition from going up the funding you get from taxpayers will go down um pretty scary that hasn't happened yet what what might need to happen for for that to change I think what would what could change that is if taxpayers started to lose their trust in higher education right if voters started to lose their trust in higher education and this is a slide arguing that I think that's exactly what's what's starting to happen um this is a Gallup poll that came out uh over the summer that showed that only 36 percent of Americans have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education and that that number is down by 20 percentage points over the last eight years um if we lose the confidence of of the taxpayers I think we're going to have a real hard time continuing to have the confidence of um of legislators here's the next thing I typically hear the next thing I typically hear is well whatever the solution to this problem it can't be online education we know online education won't work and we know that because the online education we delivered during covid was a complete disaster um I got two problems with that statement the first one is there's a legal problem with that statement right if you as a faculty member say that publicly and your school is being sued by students for a tuition refund on the inferior education that they received during during covid you actually are increasing the legal liability of your institution so you know it always shocks me when when faculty say that the second problem I have with this is there's a logical problem what we're saying is online education won't work and we know that because the education we delivered online during covid was a disaster but the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise the only way the conclusion follows is if the online education we delivered during covid represented the gold standard of what was possible online and No One Believes that right No One Believes that with more time more focus more training and better technology we couldn't do a better job of delivering education online what might that look like um let me start with an example near and dear to my heart and and that is outlier.org the reason this example is near and dear to my heart is because my daughter was the president of the steminist club uh in her high school so take feminism and combine it with stem and you've got steminism which is just about the coolest thing in the world all right so my stem and his daughter during her wanted to take AP Physics during her senior year and her High School told her you can't take AP Physics because you don't have AP calc and you can't take AP calc because you don't have pre-calc and you can't take precal because we're not offering it this summer so I'm sorry um tough luck and my wife and I weren't all that thrilled with that uh with that answer um and what I knew from this research is that there's a platform called outlier.org that offers a Calculus class that if you pass it will give you credit at the University of Pittsburgh and so we went back and said hey if our daughter passes this class that gives her credit at the University of Pittsburgh are you really telling us that that's not good enough for your high school calculus um and and we won that argument by the way what we discovered in in uh and my daughter taken this class is that there are a bunch of things about this class that were very different than what you'd get in a traditional Calculus class the first one was when it came time to to admit students they didn't ask to see your pre-calculus transcript or even whether you taken pre-calculus what they said is take a short quiz um and if you get 70 or better on this on this short quiz of simple tests of simple questions around algebra you're ready to take calculus and if there's things that you that you don't have we can coach you up um to get you to where you need to be right so a whole bunch more abundance in terms of in terms of access the second thing is that oh by the way if you if you put in the effort and you don't pass the class we'll give you a full refund and again I'm going to argue neither of those things are things we can provide in traditional higher education we need to know that you've got the prereqs and if you don't pass the class you're not getting a refund the third thing that we noticed was unlike most traditional class classes this class was taught by three different professors um Tim chartier Hannah Frye and and John Urschel and each of these professors taught exactly the same module of calculus but they taught it in their own voice and they taught it using their own examples and you could choose any of whichever these professors you wanted to take and in fact you could mix and match right so if for whatever reason Tim chartier's explanation of exponential decay didn't work for you try Hannah fry try John Urschel see if that works better for you that created that creates a lot of opportunity for students who you know might not resonate with Professor X to at least try out Professor y again something I think that would be really hard for us to do in a traditional classroom what I found really interesting about this is my stem and his daughter immediately gravitated towards Hannah Frye right immediately resonated with Hannah Frye and I was mentioning this to to a colleague of mine and what my colleague said is oh Mike there's plenty of research on this there's plenty of research that shows in quantitative classes in general men perform better than women and that difference goes away when the class is taught by a woman and the same thing is true by the way in the context of um of of people from from a racial minority racial or ethnic minority right in general people from a racial ethnic minority tend to do worse and that difference goes away when the class is taught by someone who looks like them this is a class this is a article in the American Economic Review um again a wonderful opportunity what the research tells us is that we can do much better by allowing students to choose the professor they resonate with the problem is you know in a traditional classroom environment you're stuck with somebody like me I can't provide you what what the research tells us that we know you need let me give you another example of how online education can create things that we couldn't do in person I gave this talk at let's just say a top business school and I was talking to a faculty member after the talk and what she said is our business school has an exec Ed program it's an in-person residential exec ad program we bring Executives from across the country to our campus for seven weeks and we've always thought it needed to be in person because of you know the unique in-person residential experience the only thing wrong with this exec Ed program is that female Executives aren't showing up in anywhere near the numbers we know they exist in the marketplace guess what during covid we took this residential Executive Education Program online and female Executives showed up in the proportions you'd expect and if my stem and his daughter were here she would say rightly you know that because of a series of processes that she would refer to as the patriarchy um that male Executives can take seven weeks away from their families in way that's in ways that aren't open to female executives think about all the think about all the ways that by requiring education to be held exclusively on a residential campus we're excluding people who could really benefit from our educational opportunities the last thing I want to say here is I'm not arguing that education has to be purely online and the example I want to mention here is Arizona State University and their online organic chemistry class right and you hear that and you say how the heck can you teach organic chemistry online like how do you do the labs um what are Austin and her colleagues realized is that most of the organic chemistry material works perfectly well online and to do the labs what they do is they bring the students on campus for a one-week intensive organic chemistry lab experience where they do two Labs a day one in the morning one in the evening uh all week and what they've discovered in surveying the students is that the online students have the same knowledge of organic chemistry equivalent knowledge of organic chemistry as the residential students but the online students have a stronger identity as scientists the online students walk out of that one week intensive experience saying no I'm a scientist now in a way that you wouldn't get if you did those same Labs spread out over over 14 weeks one lab a day one lab a week excuse me that auto Inspire us I think to think really creatively about how we can use these new technologies to create abundance where previously there was scarcity and that brings me to the the last uh point in the book I think we have a way to embrace this change and this again goes back to what my colleague Rahul and I saw in the context of the entertainment industry when the entertainment industry originally saw technological change they opposed it because it rightly posed a threat to their business model they rightly saw this is going to be a threat to my business model and at some point we saw them recognize that there's a difference between my model and my mission I remember pretty pretty vividly sitting down with a pretty senior creative creative person at a studio in the executive dining room and he sort of leaned forward to me and quietly so that nobody else could hear said Mike a year ago we sold my show to Netflix I want you to look at the season of my show that Netflix just put out and you're going to see that is in every way Superior to what we did on the lot cinematography is better the storytelling is better and I just can't figure it out and I think around the time Netflix and Amazon and Google started to take home a lot of the big prestigious Awards the studio started to realize my mission isn't selling shiny plastic discs for 20 bucks a pop my mission is creating great entertainment and getting that entertainment in front of an audience and I think it was that realization that allowed them to stop opposing technological change as a threat to their model and start embracing it as a way to advance their mission and I think we've seen that in a whole bunch of really Innovative platforms that the traditional big six have created what's the parallel I'm worried that a lot of my colleagues in higher education are stuck in this first mode we're opposing technological change because it poses a threat to our way of delivering education I would love to see us shift over to embracing technological change as an opportunity to advance our mission let me say this gently but firmly if our mission is to help rich kids get a leg up in the job market we're doing great no needs no need to change a thing but if our mission is helping kids from all backgrounds learn their learn their unique talents develop those talents so they can use those talents to the benefit of society I think we can do a lot better and I think doing a lot better is going to require us to embrace technology and how with that I will close and would love to interact with you on these questions okay uh can you hear me yes okay great talk really wonderful talk and and we see it all the time in universities I remember a few years ago we're trying to get people through the economics major more quickly than we had been and after looking at where the slowdowns were turns out it was one classroom that was big enough to hold all the students now one classroom should not be a constraint to anything nowadays because we have these other capabilities but that's I showed this story to many people and they say yes in our case it was chemistry here in our case it was this or that so it's a real issue we should think of those as as constraints I'd love for us to do the hard work of thinking about you know how do we break down those constraints and and re rethink the whole process um in the context of Technology so one thing you didn't mention in your talk but I think is going to be more and more important as time goes on and that's the role of demography you know where baby boomers are all retiring but it's the children of baby boomers that are going to college and then maybe it's to yeah College maybe it's to a more advanced degrees and a lot of small colleges are having trouble surviving uh yeah because they're not able to tap into that same flow of students that they were yeah before this is I mean this this is the hardest part of writing this book you know I take absolutely no pleasure in that and and and the demographic Cliff is is absolutely a real thing um what what I'm intrigued by is um the leaders in this area the leaders in creating abundance aren't I would argue the traditional Elite schools um and if you look at the leaders here it's the southern New Hampshire's and the Arizona State universities um and Georgia Tech with its online computer science master's degree um you know it's not it's not the harvards and and and the and the mits it's the people who don't have that brand name um that's at risk who are who are creating creating leadership here and they're doing it in a way that's actually allowing them to um maintain both the finances and also deliver the the equity and inclusion that you that you'd like for them to to deliver and can you provide best practices or some advice in how do you how do you succeed in this online capability because we know there were there were a lot of non-successes failures that occurred during covet that was your starting slide but then there are some excellent ones what made the difference I mean what do you need to do besides the gender mentoring and uh and ethnicity yeah I I would love for us to to sort of take a step back and say okay this is the way I've always done it and maybe it worked in a class of 30 people but now I've got all these new technologies um you know how can I use these Technologies to actually deliver the education I was I was blown away by the number of students during covid who said I really enjoyed the fact that your lecture was recorded because it allowed me to go back and re-watch parts of the lecture that that I didn't get the first time you know I was also really Blown Away by the fact that there was a whole separate class going on in the zoom chat area um you know you should go back and review that after class and students are asking questions students are answering questions the the third thing that really blew me away is how much easier it was to get guest speakers you know like one of the one of the weird things about the academy is I got tenure by becoming the world's recognized expert in this incredibly narrow area of the field hold but when I T so so my value to the academy is I'm a specialist but when I teach I teach like a generalist you know wouldn't it be cool if we could bring in Eric Bernie Olson and Catherine Tucker and Natalia Levina and Ed mcfallon into the classroom we can't because they're in their own schools um with technology we can't mm-hmm it's interesting the point you made about uh reviewing the material that's important even if you're looking at elementary education because you get sick in your home for a week you can't get caught up in algebra and now you're left behind so having that capability being able to review the material by other teachers and by reviewing the materials that the other kids got to see but you didn't that's a really big deal a really important deal for for children I think well and I I saw this when my kids were learning calculus right if you if you go on you know if you Shameless plug for YouTube If you go on YouTube and search on integration by parts you'll get like 300 really cool videos um what we'd really like to know is which of these videos are going to resonate with this particular with this particular kit you know which which are the best and which are going to resonate with you to do that we're going to have to start collecting a whole bunch of data about the individual student how they learn what what examples of have resonated for them in the past we could never do that before I think we've now got the technology that might allow us to do that yeah no absolutely we're very interested in that there's wonderful education material on YouTube and the challenges finding it in terms of something that resonates with you because this may be a great program for my brother but then uh not so good program for me and vice versa so that is a challenge uh we're extremely interested in that and I hope you will be seeing some progress in that pretty soon and it's it's just fantastic things not just on cognitive things but even motor skills and fixing your screen door or doing all this other stuff that's valuable in different contexts yeah a whole bunch of learning but but I think that again I I'm sorry to keep coming back to the entertainment industry that that but the entertainment what the what the entertainment industry did really well was they used data to say hey there are 15 000 movies on this platform I'm going to show you the five that I think are are the ones you're really gonna like um I couldn't do that in a theater but I can do it with the data I've got online let me say a word about content uh production as you know I wrote a textbook and which was the important technology at the time but there's uh now a lot of new interactive content based on that based on my book and other related things but the best advice I ever got about writing a textbook was a fellowist named Richard Hamming it was a very noted computer scientist Hamming distance and Hamming metrics and all that kind of thing and he said get together the tests the quizzes The Homework the finals get together the things that you're going to measure competency or performance and then write a book the one they want to learn from those things right so it's it's really you want to start with what's the final product I'm going to deliver skills and then go back to saying okay what are the skills I need to have in order to get to this endpoint yeah and and I would argue you know as brilliant as your textbook was and it's sitting on my shelf um it was it was limited by the medium right there were things that you couldn't do in a traditional textbook that we can do now right so again watching one of my kids learn uh learn calculus um he made a mistake that you could only make if you didn't understand this particular concept and the electronic uh uh textbook said go back and re-read this section and then come back and we'll give you a new a new question the the other thing that I think we do the other thing that I think we're Limited in the traditional classroom is students turn in homework and then a week later they get back the grade right and I think it's just amazing how much more valuable it is if you give them immediate feedback this is exactly what you got wrong um versus waiting a week and saying you know by the way you got questions 7 8 and 12 wrong let me ask you a question about the uh the high school students I take it your children were high school maybe a junior senior kind of Journey yeah they're all in college now actually one just graduated the other two are in college right but they but the issue is there's a big movement of foot these days to get calculus out of the curriculum and probability into the curriculum the reason being the probability is going to be valuable to people across from broad range calculus for all of its glory is going to be something important for a fairly narrow set of students what do you think that's I mean I remember a very smart person once saying that uh statistic statistician is going to be the sexy job for the uh for the for the yeah not and that was that was Hal by the way for those of you who aren't picking up on that um I you know I think that's a fascinating um opportunity and might you know but but it might depend a lot on who's the student what do you want to do with your career you know where where do you want to go maybe I can expose you to these two things um and and get your sense and then let you dive into one the problem is in within our existing curriculum no no you've got to take calculus yeah so you know I wonder whether we could create a more flexible environment where people could say I'm really interested in statistics and being a statistician and say well we'll give you enough of the calculator and then we'll let you focus on on the statistics right right good all right I want to switch to the other end of the spectrum and then I'll open this up for discussion this would just be a few more minutes with me and some more minutes of you uh question is looking at the other end the high end the PHD graduate school studies one of the things that is shocking to me is it now takes seven years to get a PhD in economics that's ridiculous that's seven years of your life you're out of the out of the workforce how can we get economics and Graduate Studies in general down to a more plausible time level it's an interesting question I would love to dig in deeper about why it's taking longer and longer to get the degree right is it because the students aren't prepared I kind of doubt it is it because we're worried about supply and demand and we're choking off the uh the the supply so we won't we won't uh uh you know flood the market possibly um what what I've noticed now I'll answer a slightly different question frequently when we're admitting doctoral students what I tell my colleagues is what we're looking for are decathletes right we're looking for people who are good in a whole bunch of different disciplines not just solving problems on time tests but also thinking creatively you know being independent blah blah so we're looking for decathletes and the only thing I know is their 100 yard dash time right I know because they got good scores on the GRE that they can solve problems quickly in a time-test environment um and and we sort of overweight those standard eyes test when we when we admit students some of my best students are ones who you know had okay standardized test scores but actually were really good at these other 10 events you know really good at being creative I would love for us to you know across higher education think more creatively about um are the metrics we're using on admissions the metrics we really want to use um and then you know how can we use those other metrics I think we I think we can only do it by creating abundance right yeah if I'm in a program where I can only admit three doctoral students this round I can only take that many chances if we can create more abundance maybe we can take chances on people who otherwise otherwise wouldn't have been admitted well the the challenge I think is is an important one and one way to attack that problem is to say let's have a PhD but without the thesis requirement because the thesis pulls in at least two years of that of that overage and in a lot of cases if they're going into working in industry for example or working in places where they don't have to be at The Cutting Edge of research they can still do they still have acquired excellent skills for the for businesses or universities or colleges so I think I think we really want to push for that and as you say it's a slide it's a supply and demand that's at work because if there's demand for people with that background then I can guarantee that they'll be a supply exactly all right well let's stop uh I will stop here and take some questions from the audience um so just use your chat box here if you have a question for Michael what is the evidence that University's mission is not to give a leg up to Rich Kids Money Matters um you know none abolished Legacy preferences some schools have abolished Legacy let's let's be fair um uh Johns Hopkins several of the schools yeah have abolished Legacy Legacy preferences um I you know let me let me put it this way um I don't know anyone in higher education who is excited about the fact that um wealth wealth matters in in higher education um what I'm worried about is that we're not making the logical connection that if we keep doing the same thing we're going to keep getting the same outcomes um the system is you know the system the current system that we have really favors the wealthy I would love for us to get excited about saying let's create an alternate system you know it doesn't mean burn down the existing one let's create an alternate path for students who may not have grown up in the privileged backgrounds that our current students do so that they can discover their talents develop those talents and and use those talents to go to society questions Quran it's good to see you too um how do you see existing universities embracing these these new online techniques um I would love to write a case on um the early days of harvardx and mitx um like I think when you think about disruption Quran as you as you know from my class um it's hard for the incumbent particularly the leading incumbent to adopt it um I think Harvard and MIT had it in Harvard Harvard X and mitx they had a way to embrace this new thing that didn't really cannibalize their their existing degrees but they moved very slow uh and and I'd love to understand more about why so I won't speculate as I said before the people who Moved fast were people like Paul LeBlanc at Southern New Hampshire University like he showed up at a university that was in real trouble and said the solution to this problem is adopting online education and and here's how we're going to do it and he was able to do that because they didn't have as much to lose as a Harvard or or an MIT in adopting the new technology and you look by the way at MBA programs for many MBA schools were offering evening and weekend and computer Centric education so there in the professional schools we see what can be done and broadening that would be helpful yeah and and I think that's that's a creative way to create the abundance that I'm talking about right like yeah we do have a scarce amount of space on campus but if we only required students to be there you know some fraction of the time then we could actually expand expand access the problem is in the existing model of U.S news and World Report rankings you would you would fall in the rankings if your selectivity goes down um I'd love for us to create a different way of of rewarding universities for being creative any other there we go question sorry yes yeah this is Jason this is a great question um and it's and it's honestly one that I that I you know keep it keeps me up at night um when I when I think about this this book I I still think we need something that is not driven by profit um and I still think we need something where there are experts delivering the the content I would just love love to see us embrace it in a way that creates more abundance and the and the example I'll I'll give you is um uh I have the chief data officer at UPMC come in and talk to my class uh each year about how data is changing Healthcare and the last time he came in what he said is we've looked at our data and what we've discovered is that for most types of medical procedures Telehealth gives you equivalent Health outcomes is coming into the office like there's some things where you got to come into the office but for most types of things Telehealth works just fine so these are you know health professionals saying I'm going to do Telehealth to do what it does best and I'm going to have the the in-person experience for what it does best I think we can still hang on to the experts while also embracing these changes okay we have hit our time limit are there any last words that you'd like to convey to the audience very attentive and interested in the audience I must say just I I you know basically what I say in in the book you know I I love higher education higher education has been very good to me And yet when I look at our system of higher education I think what we're doing is financially unsustainable what we're doing is morally unsustainable and the problems are systemic which means it's going to be really hard for us to solve it from within the existing system what we need is is a separate system one that can create the abundance that that I'm hoping that we can create and I assure you YouTube will have a role there so thank you very much Mr great to great talk a really eye-opening and uh hope the book does well thanks thank you Hal thanks for having me okay [Music]

2023-09-29 20:41

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