The Center for American Progress has released Clay Christensen's latest spinoff argument, Disrupting College. Kevin Carey has some smart observations at Ed Sector's Quick and Ed blog. I had a different visceral reaction to the 80-page pamphlet: meh. Not from a "oh dear oh me oh my the sky is falling" angle but "sheesh, this is what Christensen thinks passes for solid analysis??"
Fundamentally, Christensen and his coauthors argue that we're close to some tipping point on dramatic disruption of higher-ed as an economic sector, and policymakers should welcome rather than shun it. There are two fundamental flaws in the argument:
First, higher ed is a much more dynamic entity than Christensen et al. assume. That doesn't mean that all aspects of this rapid change are good, but Christensen's model essentially assumes some core of "traditional" providers to a market, providers whose behavior is fairly stable because change is hard for those who have established themselves.
That's not reality on the ground in higher ed. Christensen's argument makes perfect sense if you just ignore the expansion of community colleges, expansion of online learning, expansion of professional fields as undergraduate majors, expanded adjunctification, regular reconfiguration of workforce-development programs in community colleges, recent transformation of many former undergraduate-only state institutions to research institutions, creation of national student markets by many formerly regional places (e.g., Vanderbilt), expansion in for-profit higher ed, and a host of other changes in higher ed. Not all of these changes are good from my perspective, but to ignore them or to squeeze them into your particular analytical box in this way is unpersuasive.
More fundamentally (and perhaps a cause of the first flaw), Christensen has the economic-history equivalent of a hammer, and to him, apparently everything in education looks like a nail. Not all business change is "disruptive innovation" (or what's close to it). And at least in this brief, Christensen appears to smush all interesting organizational and market-structure matters into "stuff that's related to innovation." I'd be very curious to see what economists who specialize in the theory of the firm would say about the first, and what both microeconomists and sociologists would say about the second, but it strikes me as analytical handwaving.
At least in education, this analytical structure fails to address either flash-in-the-pan or slow-broil change. An example of the education history flash in the pan is monitorial schooling, a wave of truly disruptive innovation in English and Atlantic-coast American cities in the early 19th century, where you would see several hundred small children in a classroom supervised by one adult. At least in theory, the better students would run recitation groups (and be monitors, thus the name of the system), and the best student would be the head monitor, with the one adult overseeing this complicated setup. Cities abandoned monitorial schooling fairly quickly and turned to self-contained primary classrooms instead with one teacher per classroom. Failure of low-cost innovation? I wouldn't know how Christensen would explain it.
An example of the slow broil is the public high school. While the first one appeared in the 1820s in Boston, through most of the 19th century high schools were one of many educational institutions that competed for the same basic market: the limited number of potential students who were past primary education and not working. If you were interested in more schooling, you might go to a high school, but you also might attend an academy, a seminary, a college, or a normal school. In many cases, there wasn't much of a choice and you would attend whatever was local. But high schools were particularly controversial because of public funding for very small institutions; an 1860s lawsuit in Michigan argued that raising taxes for a high school was illegal. Two books have been written (with different interpretations) of why Beverly, Massachusetts, shut down its high school in 1860, defying a state law requiring towns of a certain size build high schools. Yet, half a century later, high schools were in the middle of a huge growth spurt. The reasons for the slow-broil before the explosion are outside normal market analysis and are related much more to controversies about state authority over schools, labor-market opportunities of teenagers, and political legitimacy of small-enrollment institutions. And that political debate remained with the politics of high schools. Even as high schools were becoming the dominant institution of adolescence in the Great Depression, superintendents worried that the National Youth Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps were threatening their legitimacy. That sort of stuff is entirely outside the scope of Christensen's analysis, and yet it's often critical to explaining the dynamics of specific educational markets.
In a nutshell, here's my central beef with the CAP piece, with apologies to Wolfgang Pauli: it's not even wrong. Because higher ed is essentially dynamic, my guess is that whatever happens in the next five years, Christensen would crow that he's been proven right. That's not the sign of a tight analysis; it's much closer to a cold-reading trick. In the end, the CAP piece reads like a cross between Malcolm Gladwell's thinly-based pop sociology and Tom Vander Ark's breezy optimism about the Next Big Thing in education, but without any of Gladwell's charming style. Meh.
Unfortunately, it seems that the less rigorous the analysis of these things, the more likely the rubes who determine policy will buy it.
I wanna come back as a carny.
Even more fundamental, I think, is that the report misunderstands the nature of innovation in contemporary society. Innovation is not a panacea, but is itself the expression of a social stratification process involving both the allocation of resources and legitimacy. Innovation, for econo-sociology, occurs within modular divisions of labor, and is then distibuted, creating subsequent independent modularity.
Sherman, you may want to add the rise and fall of apprenticeship to your short history of ed. Although not addressed by the report, the inability of apprenticeship to navigate the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of other transient proto-forms of education, all have present day homologs. And dynamism has nothing to do with survival: apprenticeship was dynamic enough to endure for centuries, since the middle ages until about 1840 in this country.
The proposed business plan is unsustainable. Higher ed — and especially online for-profits — are heavily subsidized by federal and state government. Once these subsidies begin to shrink and fade, the for-profits will sink sooner than those less dependent on the taxpayer dollars.
This — in reality — is the innovation that is involved here: finding new ways to make a buck. For some reason, the authors seem to have missed this when discussing accreditation: accreditation is what pulls open the purse strings of the public fisc (and is supposed to control educational quality, but does not — especially for eLearning).
I also have problems using “disruptive innovation” as a post-hoc explanatory tool. Of course the business world is a dynamic place; new businesses emerge all the time, and some even survive. No one denies this. But what the approach here lacks is an appreciation for the institutional environment and the organizational forms that litter the cultural landscape. I guess that’s what happens when run-of-the-mill Rogers-ism is stretched too far.