Take It From an Ex-Journalist: Adapt or Die – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
Byron P. White, vice president for university engagement and chief diversity officer at Cleveland State University a shares Déjà vu moment by comparing a University senior leadership retreat where the need for innovation and change was discussed to a similar retreat discussion he had years earlier as part of the senior management of the Chicago Tribune. The fundamental challenges that were obvious to the newspaper industry a short while ago are amazingly similar to those that higher education faces now and like the newspaper industry, higher education is not listening to the demands of the general public. The following data is just one example of the gap in thinking:
A survey of 1,000 American adults and 540 senior-level administrators released last fall by Time magazine and the Carnegie Corporation of New York bears this out. While 62 percent of the administrators included “to learn to think critically” as either the most-important or second-most-important reason people should go to college, only 26 percent of the public ranked it as such. Likewise, 80 percent of the adults said that at many colleges, the education students receive is not worth what they pay for it. Only 41 percent of the administrators agreed with them.
Even though I am a staunch supporter of a liberal education even I can see that most people view education as a preparation for jobs rather than a preparation for society. Unlike White who is optimistic and posits that higher education does have the appetite for change I subscribe to Clayton Christensen’s way thinking and suggest that it will take a significant disruption to higher education before we start to see the changes that so many know are necessary.
