No, Universities Aren't Dead

There's a brief but informative post on LinkedIn that reminded me of a paper I submitted as part of my doctoral course work that presented the university (writ large) as a business. As such, the goal of the university is to make enough money to sustain itself and ensure its persistence. The paper wasn't well received by my professor, but I believe the claims remain valid and perhaps more relevant today than they were 20 years ago.

Universities are painfully slow, particularly mid-tier private universities that so often struggle to release themselves from archaic thinking and practices. Some degree programs are laughably outdated, despite efforts to pause, combine or close those that are woefully under-enrolled. Tuition at many of these universities has reached genuinely absurd levels. And while a 22-year-old today can learn just about anything from YouTube and earn a Google tech certificate in six months, there are still ~20 million students enrolled in higher education in the US. That number flies in the face of the echoing warnings from the likes of Clayton Christensen toward the end of the last century that universities in the US were going the way of printed newspapers. 

What Christensen and other higher ed futurists failed to account for is the way in which some progressive universities are able to thrive simply by not defending the status quo. These are the universities that have experimented with, explored and adapted to "disruptors" like MOOCs, bootcamps, and ChatGPT. They're the universities that have discovered they can offer the contexts and experiences that the internet can't. And not surprising (at least not to me) is that the smartest of those universities realized those discoveries first in their professional continuing education (PCE) divisions. When supported and funded appropriately, PCE units serve as the most strategically important part of the modern university. They are the one academic unit on campus that designs programming around employer demand, not 400-year old disciplinary boundaries. They iterate on curriculum constantly and operate closer to market speed than any other part of the university. 

Any platform can stream a lecture. That's the ubiquity of content delivery that Christensen fixated on. What a university's PCE unit does is to stake institutional credibility on the outcome of that content. Not in a 120 credit hour degree, but in credentials that have demonstrable value because they are immediately applicable and carry the universities credibility and reputation. An AI tutor can teach machine learning concepts beautifully. It can't yet satisfy a state licensing board or signal to an HR department that a candidate has been rigorously assessed by qualified practitioners. 

And this is exactly what the LinkedIn post gets right. Change doesn't kill universities, but refusing to change does. PCE units are not proofs of concept. They've been doing the hard work of rapid reinvention for decades while the rest of the university slugs along. They're building partnerships with regional employers. They're designing short, stackable credentials that connect into degree pathways for students who want them. The universities that'll still matter in twenty years will be the ones betting on the parts of the institution that have already proven they can evolve.