University degree no longer comes with promise of stable job

The unwritten promise of a post-secondary education has been to earn a degree in an applied field such as engineering and you’ll end up with a good, stable job, but the millennial generation is finding that can no longer be counted on. I have been thinking about this issue for some time. Last year, I posted an article on this blog by Robert Reich, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley and former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton. I was stimulated to share that article by what I was seeing with my own students from the University of British Columbia and their struggles, and contrasting that with my own experience years ago, walking into my Silicon Valley dream career by sheer chance. That simply no longer happens. Grads must begin plotting out a plan early, no later than the beginning of their third year, and begin to execute on it in order to find an entry-level position commensurate with their education. Networking and cold calling are imperative, but as this article points out, even that may not guarantee solid employment. 

Source CBC News/Business: ‘It’s not a guarantee’: University degree no longer comes with promise of stable job

‘The millennial side hustle,’ not stable job, is the new reality for university grads

Recent graduates are finding a post-secondary education is no longer a guarantee of stable employment

By Nick Purdon and Leonardo Palleja, CBC News Posted: Mar 12, 2017 5:00 AM ET Last Updated: Mar 12, 2017 5:00 AM ET

Christian McCrave, 21, stands in front of his parents’ house in London, Ont. He moved back in when he couldn’t find a job after graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering. (Nick Purdon/CBC)

Twenty-one-year old Christian McCrave feels like he did his part.

He got good grades in high school and completed a four-year degree at the University of Guelph in southwestern Ontario. He studied mechanical engineering, in part because he thought it would land him a job.

It hasn’t.

“I actually thought that coming out of school that I would be a commodity and someone would want me,” McCrave said. “But instead, I got hit with a wall of being not wanted whatsoever in the industry.”

McCrave says he believed in the unwritten promise of a post-secondary education: work hard at school, and you’ll end up with a good and stable job.

Now, he’s not so sure.

“Being unemployed while having a degree is kind of a kick in the face,” McCrave said. “If anything, it’s a setback. You have all this debt and this degree, and everyone has one, but it doesn’t get you further in life sometimes.”

Since graduating last year, McCrave has applied for 250 engineering jobs, but he’s only had four interviews and no job offer.

McCrave isn’t alone. More than 12 per cent of Canadians between the ages of 15 and 24 are unemployed and more than a quarter are underemployed, meaning they have degrees but end up in jobs that don’t require them.

The latest numbers from Statistics Canada show that the unemployment rate for 15-to-24-year-olds is almost twice that of the general population.

McCrave has expanded his job search to include retail and recently applied to work at the local Sobeys grocery store near his parent’s house in London, Ont., where he has lived since soon after graduation.

“It’s a job. Something to feel accomplished from,” said McCrave. “As much as an engineer can be accomplished by cutting deli meats.”

Co-ops, apprenticeships key to employability

The challenge McCrave faces is experience: namely, he doesn’t have any. The most recent work experience on his resume is sales associate at Winners.

Sandro Perruzza, the chief executive officer at the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE), is familiar with graduates like McCrave.

Since graduating, McCrave has applied for 250 engineering jobs but hasn’t had a single offer, he says. (Leonardo Palleja/CBC )

“He could have applied for co-ops or apprenticeships while he was at school — even if it delayed his graduation,” Perruzza said. “We strongly advocate co-ops. The fact is because of the sheer number of applicants these days, the ones who get the jobs have some kind of experience.”

Should McCrave land one of the retail jobs he’s applied for, he’ll achieve one of the hallmarks of his generation: underemployment.

‘With millennials, the idea is that we are lazy and that we don’t work hard and stuff is given to us.’– Christian McCrave, 21, engineering graduate

A 2014 Canadian Teachers’ Federation report found nearly a quarter of Canada’s youth are either unemployed, working less than they want or have given up looking for work entirely.

The number of engineers in Ontario who are underemployed is 33 per cent, according to the OSPE.

Still, McCrave says he often hears it’s his own fault that he’s unemployed.

“With millennials, the idea is that we are lazy and that we don’t work hard and stuff is given to us — the idea of the participation award,” McCrave said. “We didn’t want the participation award. We didn’t want to be told we are not good enough but here’s an award anyways. We want to compete; we want to succeed.”

‘The millennial side hustle’

Fast forward a few years in the job trajectory of the millennial generation, and you’ll find Clair Parker. Parker, 26, has a political science degree from Carleton University in Ottawa and a certificate in public relations from Humber College in Toronto.

“I live in an apartment, I have three roommates, and I don’t have benefits,” said Parker. “If I were the exception, I would feel upset about that because I would feel that I had done something wrong, but I am not the exception. I am the norm.”

Clair Parker might not be making direct use of her political science degree at her job as a bartender at a small Toronto brewery, but don’t call her underemployed. ‘It implies just the [job] title means more than what is going on in the workplace,’ she says. (Nick Purdon/CBC)

Parker’s bartending job doesn’t pay enough to make ends meet so she cobbles together enough money to live in Toronto by also working at a yoga studio and house sitting.

“I joke with my friends all the time about the millennial side hustle,” Parker says. “We all have different side hustles that we do to get money. So many people who would have worked in-house for a company before are freelancing now.”

The millennial side hustle (also known as the gig economy) means no steady job but also no safety net.

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“If you have a toothache now and you are 24 years old, you freak out,” says Parker. “That’s going to be a couple of grand when you go to the dentist for the first time. I think people are going to feel really disenfranchised by the workforce and uncared for by the workforce.”

Parker works primarily at Halo brewery in Toronto, bartending and doing whatever else is needed to keep the small business running.

‘Being precariously employed takes its toll,’ says Ellis-Hale. (Leonardo Palleja/CBC)

“On paper, I am a bartender,” Parker says. “But anyone who has worked with a small business understands that it’s kind of an all hands on deck situation. You have a lot of opportunities to learn a lot of different things.”

Parker bristles at the suggestion that she is underemployed.

“I am not underemployed, and I kind of get offended when people say I am underemployed,” Parker says. “It implies that they know more about my situation than I know about my situation. It implies just the [job] title means more than what is going on in the workplace. It’s a huge assumption.”

While Parker probably could have gotten her job without five years of post-secondary education, she says her education will allow her to grow along with the business. She is banking on potential — her own and the company’s.

The university enrolment boom

The promise of higher education is alive and well in Canada. There are more university students than ever before. In 2015, there were more than two million students enrolled at Canadian universities and colleges, compared to almost 800,000 in 1980.

Kimberly Ellis-Hale has been teaching at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., since 1998 but still has to re-apply for her job every four months. (Leonardo Palleja/CBC)

“With a good education, you will have a good future. With a good education, you will have a good job,” said Kimberly Ellis-Hale, an instructor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., who teaches sociology and other subjects. “And I think for past generations, it may have been [the case]. I think for future generations, it’s not a guarantee.”

Even though economic indicators that track employment reveal a trend toward more precarious jobs, Ellis-Hale says most of her students don’t see that as their future. She didn’t either, but that’s how things turned out.

‘I teach in a place that sells education as the path to a better and more secure life, and I don’t have a part of that life.’– Kimberly Ellis-Hale, contract faculty, Wilfrid Laurier University

Ellis-Hale is contract faculty, and even though she’s been teaching university courses at Laurier since 1998, she has to re-apply for her job every four months.

“I have very little job security,” Ellis-Hale said. “And being precariously employed takes its toll.”

Ellis-Hale’s two children are now grown up and live on their own, but she vividly remembers standing in the pharmacy when they were young trying to decide which child needed antibiotics the most.

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“I couldn’t afford to purchase both of them,” Ellis-Hale says. “And how do you live with that? I teach in a university. I teach in a place that sells education as the path to a better and more secure life, and I don’t have a part of that life.”

Turning the promise into a guarantee

The University of Regina’s UR Guarantee program, launched in 2009, turns the unwritten promise of post-secondary education into an actual guarantee. If a student enrolled in the program doesn’t get a full-time job in their field within six months of graduation, they can return for a year of undergraduate study tuition-free.

“The reason we do this is we know that if students do all the things that are part of the program, they are going to be successful,” said Naomi Deren, associate director of student success at the university.

Noami Deren is the associate director of student success at the University of Regina and runs the school’s UR Guarantee program, which lets graduates return for a free year of study if they don’t get a job in their field within six months. (Leonardo Palleja/CBC)

Students from any department can enrol in the program and must complete career development training, including resume reviews and job interview seminars.

In their final year, students are required to network and complete a labour market overview in their chosen field. Their job search begins while they are still at school.

‘The average student doesn’t … do that preparation, isn’t thinking about their career in second year and is sort of left scrambling at the end of it.’-Naomi Deren, associate director of student success, University of Regina

“I really think that the average student doesn’t do all of that stuff, doesn’t do that preparation, isn’t thinking about their career in second year and is sort of left scrambling at the end of it,” Deren said.

Of the 120 students who have participated in the program only two have come back for the free year.

“Honestly, everyone else has found what they were looking for,” Deren said. “We have students who are teaching — they got full time contracts right out of university … We have students who are working in marketing, communications. We have a reporter for the Leader Post.”

Keeping students from dropping out

Jenna deBoth, 21, is in her fourth year of an education degree program at the University of Regina and all she can think about is graduating.

“I am so excited. I can’t wait to actually get out there and get a job,” she said.

Jenna deBoth, 21, says that without the University of Regina’s UR Guarantee program, she probably would have dropped out of university. Now, she’s about to graduate with an education degree. (Nick Purdon/CBC )

Still, deBoth, from the small town of Hudson Bay, Sask., almost didn’t make it past her first year of university. She credits the UR Guarantee program with keeping her from dropping out.

“I was absolutely terrified to be on campus because even though Regina is a small city, to me, it was huge,” deBoth said.

‘If I don’t get a job in my field? Well, I am gonna keep trying.’– Jenna deBoth, 21, 4th-year University of Regina student

DeBoth happened to see a poster advertising the UR Guarantee program. She signed up and within a few months, she was volunteering and had a growing circle of friends.

“We see ourselves in the beginning as high school guidance counsellors,” Deren said. “We make sure students are successful and are retained here at the university.”

Deren says retention rates among UR Guarantee students are 10 per cent higher than those of the general student population.

DeBoth hasn’t yet found a teaching job for the fall, and she admits she’s nervous about what’s out there.

“If I don’t get a job in my field? Well, I am gonna keep trying,” she said. “This is something that I am passionate about. I have made sure I have skills that will help me no matter where I go.”

Choosing A College Major And A Career Path

My own odyssey in choosing a major and a career is probably not a great guide for today’s students.  I had only a vague idea that I wanted a quality “liberal arts education,” to equip me with the thinking skills necessary to guide my career. I chose an undergraduate major in Speech-Communication with double minors in Philosophy and Photography. In retrospect, despite the disadvantages of my choice, it turned out well at that time, primarily because being able to communicate and present yourself is perhaps the most important skill in any career. Warren Buffett agrees with that. But in today’s much more competitive environment, I am sadly less confident that it would work. This is the dilemma for today’s students.

In the end, by pure serendipity and sheer luck, I ended up in a career in a bleeding-edge high technology company, Intel Corporation, without any specific education or skills in the technology of advanced semiconductor physics. I was hired for my “aptitude,” and learned everything else I needed to know by osmosis on the job. I am now viewed by many as an imposing technical expert.  I like the adage that universities are for education, and business is for training.  As I began to work with Ivy League MBA’s, I found that they had been driven by popular thinking at that time that called for an undergraduate degree in some engineering discipline followed by an MBA. Some of them said that they wished they had my education, while I said I wished I had their education. At one point I asked a business school mentor if I should go back and get an MBA. He laughed and told me I had already earned one.  Later, as I was asked to talk with students at Reed College in Portland, perhaps the leading undergraduate liberal arts college in the country, I was warned that few would be interested in jobs with Intel because over 70% of Reed graduates go on to graduate degrees. Reed is also famous for teaching calligraphy to Steve Jobs, which some say inspired Apple’s superior typography and graphics. Despite that hurdle, I ended up recruiting nearly two dozen “Reedies” to work at Intel. One who worked for me at Intel left to get a Harvard MBA, and later became one of the best-known global venture capitalists. One my brightest mentoree’s dropped out of college completely as did Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and is doing very well. Go figure.  All of this is to say that it is very hard to say what is the right college major for any particular individual or career path.

One thing does seem clear to me: it is a much fiercer competitive environment than when I started my career.  The path I found is just simply no longer there. The most sought after jobs and companies attract thousands of applicants. As always the most resourceful will always succeed. At the same time, I am still seeing many of my management students still working in gyms or selling shoes. I am seeing people abandon their management education and take entirely different career paths.  While thinking about all of this, I came across this 2015 New York Times article on choosing a college major which I am sharing here. I also emphasize my three “s” values”: self-analysis, self-confidence, and self-reliance.

Reblogged from The New York Times:

EDUCATION LIFE | EDUCATION LIFE

Four Steps to Choosing a College Major (and a Career Path)

By NATHAN GEBHARD   JULY 31, 2015

What will you be doing on this date 20 years from now? No, really. Try to answer that. Given what you know about your ever-changing self, and factoring in the breakneck pace of societal change, can you accurately predict what the future world around you will look like and what role you’ll play in it?

Grave warnings from parents, advisers and the news media suggest that whatever major you choose will dictate where you end up. Suddenly, you’re not just choosing a major, you’re choosing your ultimate fate.

What I wish I’d known in college is that most people’s work shape-shifts in unforeseeable ways. I’ve learned this not just from statistics, but from sitting down with thousands of people in candid conversations about work, life and what it takes to forge something that matters to you. It started after college when I realized I didn’t have enough knowledge to decide what to do with my life.

Two friends were equally lost, so we started on a road trip of self-discovery, seeking out people who had found something they loved and asking them how they’d done it. That trip turned into Roadtrip Nation, a career exploration organization that produces, among other things, a curriculum for middle and high school students and a long-running public television series about finding meaningful work.

After 15 years of talking to everyone from C.E.O.s to camel ranchers, what we’ve learned is comforting: Most people are unsure when they’re starting out. Where they end up isn’t a direct result of their major; it’s the result of a meandering process. Their major — whether they stuck with it or applied it in new ways — was the start of channeling their interests, values, and skills into work that made the struggles and hard work it took to get there worth it. Here are steps to help you do the same.

1. Separate your goals from other people’s goals for you.

Richard LinklaterCreditPaul Drinkwater/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images

How do you quiet the noise that’s coming at you from family, friends, and society? Parents suggesting you should be a lawyer, policy makers defining “success” in terms of paychecks, even the voice inside your head saying you’re not smart enough.

For the Oscar-nominated directorRichard Linklater, the noise said that the arts wouldn’t lead anywhere. Friends and family — people he respected — told him to go to medical or law school. But Mr. Linklater suggests you consider where these people are coming from. “Do they really want you to be a doctor? Do they really want you to be a lawyer?” he wondered. “No, it just sounds good.” Instead he realized: “I don’t want to live like them, you know? I don’t want their life. I remember just sitting there going, ‘O.K., I’m going to reject the advice and do the complete, polar, 180-degree opposite of what everyone is telling me to do.’ ”

Dropping out of Sam Houston State University after sophomore year, he took a job on an oil rig. He used his savings to buy equipment and take film classes at a community college. The auteur of “Boyhood” indeed defied the expectations of people at home.

2. Forget passion; follow an interest.

Adam SteltznerCreditIlya S. Savenok/Getty Images for Smithsonian Magazine

Most advice about majors includes the admonition “Follow your passion.” But passion is something you discover over time, by finding an interest, however small, and nurturing it. There’s no epiphany; it’s a collection of small decisions that move you step by tiny step.

Adam Steltzner, an engineer with NASA’sJet Propulsion Laboratory, barely made it out of high school, dropped out of music school and was playing in rock bands as restlessness crept in. “I had actually started to notice that when I would return home from playing a show at night, the stars were in a different place in the sky. I was thinking, ‘Whoa, they’re moving. Why do they move?’ ” That moment would have passed by without changing anything in his life except that he went to sign up for an astronomy class at a community college and was told he had to take a physics prerequisite. This started him on the path to a degree in engineering mechanics, to getting his Ph.D., to landing the Curiosity rover on Mars.

He wasn’t chasing engineering because it would get him a steady job. When he felt that little tug of curiosity, he followed it. “Surrender to the process,” he advised, “rather than the goal.”

3. Put your decisions in real-world context.

Whether you’re attracted to something because of its promise of prosperity or because it stirs you on a deep level — neither inherently right or wrong — experts warn: Determine whether expectations match reality.

Veronica BelmontCreditSteve Jennings/Getty Images for Engadget

Veronica Belmont, a Web and TV host, producer and writer (Twitter followers: 1.75 million), advises this: “If you’re really passionate about a topic, and you want to work in that field, you should already be doing it.” Now more than ever, you can glimpse the inner workings of industries. Follow someone on Twitter to gain insight into a field, read industry publications to track trends, or watch free online lectures.

If your interest is piqued, go for full immersion with an internship. Ms. Belmont started out studying audio production at Emerson College in Boston and added new media studies as she became more interested in Internet culture. An audio production internship at CNET clinched her interest in tech.

The important thing here, Ms. Belmont suggests, is not to master something but to test before you invest years of education and time.

4. Yes, you do have to be good at it. Be flexible.

Dips in the job market, failing at a venture you wanted to succeed in badly, or just realizing that something isn’t as envisioned — these realities will force you to bend, contort or even redesign your ideal.

Jad Abumrad’s carefully planned vision came undone when he realized he wasn’t suited for the job he thought his major pointed toward. He had studied music composition and creative writing at Oberlin College and Conservatory, intending to score films. “That didn’t really work out. I just wasn’t very good at it. And so, at a certain point, I just gave it up. I thought my plan was wrong.”

Jad Abumrad CreditTony Cenicola/The New York Times

He was ready to start from scratch when his girlfriend reasoned that he didn’t have to abandon what he’d worked toward. “She made the suggestion, ‘You kind of like to write. You kind of like to make music. You’re not really good at either on their own terms, but maybe you could somehow find the middle ground. Try out radio.’ ”

It wasn’t a seamless transition — he began by working for free — but he stuck it out, creating a style of radio that fuses science and storytelling with music and sound. As a producer and host of WNYC’s “Radiolab,” his job is eerily close to what he originally imagined for himself, scoring films; he just had to stretch his thinking to get there.

It’s that kind of flexible mentality that our interview subjects point to, time after time. A major isn’t a lifelong sentence; it’s a jumping-off point. You’ll still stumble and have to recalibrate. But if you live life by connecting each successive dot, you open yourself up to possibilities you never could have planned.

Nathan Gebhard is co-founder of Roadtrip Nation and co-author of “Roadmap: The Get-It-Together Guide for Figuring Out What to Do With Your Life.”

The Rules of Sewage

This is a metaphorical essay on personal ethics, worthy of a serious read and contemplation. When I saw the title I was intrigued but suspected it had something to do with Andy Grove’s colorful adage, “sewage flows downhill,” which means “if anything bad happens it will eventually flow down to you.”  This is about ethics. The points made here are particularly apt in light of  the huge number and sheer scale of recent business frauds: the Volkswagen fraud, LIBOR, Lehman Brothers, Bernie Madoff’s pyramid scheme, Conrad Black in Canada, Olympus in Japan, Bernie Ebbers and Worldcom, Tyco International, stretching back all the way to Enron, Michael Milken’s junk bonds, and the 1980’s savings & loan debacle.

This is only a small selective list and many will be able to think of many other well-known scandals. The problem is that there are no easy answers in many situations. How much do we risk by taking an ethical stand on an issue, and the fact that the bigger the issue the bigger our personal risk?  It is very existential.  At the same time appear to have learned nothing from all these recent scandals, tightened regulations or changed personal behavior. A recent study of Wall Street brokers suggests that most would still commit fraud, if they benefited substantially, and believed that they would not be prosecuted for it.

Read more: 10 Biggest Corporate Frauds In Recent U.S. History

 

Source: The Rules of Sewage

Reblogged via WordPress

David Hunt, December 8, 2013

December 8, 2013Uncategorizedessay, original

Some years ago I heard an analogy that resonated with me.  It was a description of learning something – some piece of information about a person’s character – that was so negative, so vile, that no matter what else you knew about that person, you instantlyunderstood the core of the person in question.  There is, in fact, a folk-wisdom saying that illustrates this concept, which I first heard on a talk radio show: “That tells me everything I need to know about him.”  Ironically, the talk radio host from whom I first heard this expression was revealed to have done something I consider so vile that, even before he was taken off the air, I realized that deed (plus his “Yeah, so what?” attitude) told me everything I needed to know about him – and I stopped listening… and having stumbled across his new broadcast home while channel-surfing, I still refuse to listen to him.

Before I dig into this, I want to be clear – nobody is perfect.  We all have our flaws, being human beings, and need to be forgiving and tolerant.  We all struggle with weaknesses and sin, and while Jewish I’ve found I like the instructional concept of the Seven Deadly Sins (and the other side of the coin, the Seven Cardinal Virtues), and am convinced that while all these are human weaknesses, each person has their “one sin” with which they wrestle as their dominant weakness.  And in that struggle with and – hopefully – victory over it do we demonstrate that we are more than a collection of chemicals and cells, but sentient creatures striving to improve ourselves.

So… this analogy goes as follows:

Imagine you have two cups.  One contains the purest, clearest, most wonderful water possible.  The other, raw sewage.  When you mix the two, you get sewage.  The same for a cup of sewage and a pitcher of water, or a barrel of water.  Regardless of the size of the pure water container, the sewage contaminates it.

This became the root of what I refer to as “The Rules of Sewage” in regards to a person’s character.  This one is the First Rule of Sewage, The Non-Proportional Rule of Sewage.  It means, as the saying above goes, that you can sometimes learn a thing about a person that taints the entirety of their personality – e.g., a person beats their spouse.  It doesn’t matter what else they are, what acts they do, they are polluted by that one thing.

This simmered in my mind over a couple of years, and I started to formulate other Rules of Sewage.  Each was based on the same base concept – mixing water and sewage.  Thus far I’ve come up with six.

The Second Rule of Sewage is the Non-Compartmentalized Rule of Sewage.  You cannot pour a cup of sewage into a container of water, and have it only remain in the place you poured it.  Bad character leaks into other elements of character.  E.g., a person who cheats on their spouse – thus breaking a sacred oath – cannot be counted on to keep an oath in any other part of their life.

The Third Rule of Sewage is the Immersive Rule of Sewage.  Imagine an edible fish taken from that pure water, placed in sewage, and somehow surviving – no matter the fish’s immune system and other defenses, it will become contaminated.  No matter how pure you are to begin with, if you are surrounded by bad people or bad content, it will start to affect you.  E.g., a good, honest person who goes to work in a place with bad ethics and stays there – for whatever reason – will sooner or later find they are making compromises to their own character and standards, and rationalizing their doing so.  (And this is, of course, the root of the proverb “Birds of a feather, flock together.”)

The Fourth Rule of Sewage is Irreversible Rule of Sewage.  Simply put, it’s a lot easier to mix the sewage in and ruin the water than reversing the process.  While people are certainly capable of change, it takes deliberate effort to do so, and usually also an ongoing awareness and maintenance of that change to avoid slipping back to whatever factor is being avoided.

The Fifth Rule of Sewage is the Odiferous Rule of Sewage.  Sewage, to put it bluntly, stinks like sh*t.  Bad odors like that can be covered up or contained, but not forever.  Sooner or later the malodorous item in a person’s character will out, and be readily apparent.  This actually ties in with…

The Sixth Rule of Sewage, the Reactive Rule of Sewage – when faced with a tank of sewage, normal people react negatively.  And while a person learning something about another (ref: Rule One) won’t physically turn their head away and scrunch up their face in disgust, I believe the plain truth is that upon learning of such a think will cause a decent person to dissociate – to whatever degree possible – from the other.  Failing to do so, or worse expressing approval, could be considered an example application of Rule One about them too.

In putting this concept “out there” it will be interesting to see if other Rules of Sewage develop in the comments.

Why Are We Losing Our Global Influence?

As we are now on the verge of U.S. Congressional ‘fast track” approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement, and simultaneously a severe challenge to the integrity of the European Union as Greece and the EU cannot seem to agree on terms to avoid a catastrophe, perhaps it is worth stepping back to consider these complex issues from a higher perspective. None of us have definitive answers. One thing is clear: the U.S. position as a global leader is under serious challenge. In my years in international business. I have learned that interest in international policy studies and business has declined sharply in North America.

I have learned that interest in international policy studies and business has declined sharply in North America.  The Thunderbird Graduate School of Global Management in Arizona, which has supplied many great global business execs and Peace Corps volunteers, one of whom I hired at Intel,  has recently been forced to sell itself to Arizona State University due to lack of enrollment. The Import-Export Bank is under attack in Congress by right wing interests, while China builds its international trade influence. INSEAD, the international school of management, based in Fontainebleau, outside Paris, continues to do well, but with little U.S. participation.

Years ago when I began my career in high tech management, my closest colleague, and friend, a recent Harvard MBA at that time, suggested that we both should “hitch our wagons” to the star of international business. He argued that as exports were only a tiny fraction of the U.S. economy, it was a “no brainer.”  The joke today is that “we are still waiting” for the U.S. to lead the world economy, and for our millions to come pouring in.  We devoted our careers to working abroad, waiting for the opportunity to exploit it, but nothing happened for us. Today the challenges for the United States and Canada are even greater. China is moving aggressively to dominate its Asian sphere of influence, as well as Africa other continents, and there are suggestions that China and Russia would both like to use Greece as a global leverage point. So I have more questions than answers about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and EU policy in an age where U.S. global influence is in serious decline.

I wrote a comment recently in the New York Times on the topic of the TPP debate.  It went something  like this, “There is a larger issue in this. While I share the concerns of the opponents of the TPP, I believe that there is also a story about the growing efforts of China to expand its influence and territory in the Pacific region. The two stories are intertwined. The question and the debate should be about how best to counter China economically and politically before we are faced with having to go to war over the Spratley Islands. I fear that there are no easy answers.”

The Decline of International Studies Why Flying Blind Is Dangerous

REBLOGGED from Foreign Affairs By Charles King In October 2013, the U.S. Department of State eliminated its funding program for advanced language and cultural training on Russia and the former Soviet Union. Created in 1983 as a special appropriation by Congress, the so-called Title VIII Program had supported generations of specialists working in academia, think tanks, and the U.S. government itself. But as a State Department official told the Russian news service RIA Novosti at the time, “In this fiscal climate, it just didn’t make it.” The program’s shuttering came just a month before the start of a now well-known chain of events: Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the descent of U.S.-Russian relations to their lowest level since the Cold War. The timing was, to say the least, unfortunate. The end of the United States’ premier federal program for Russian studies saved taxpayers only $3.3 million—the cost of two Tomahawk cruise missiles or about half a day’s sea time for an aircraft carrier strike group. The development was part of a broader trend: the scaling back of a long-term national commitment to education and research focused on international affairs. Two years ago, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences warned of a hidden crisis in the humanities and social sciences. “Now more than ever,” the academy’s report concluded, “the spirit of international cooperation, the promotion of trade and foreign investment, the requirements of international diplomacy, and even the enhancement of national security depend in some measure on an American citizenry trained in humanistic and social scientific disciplines, including languages, transnational studies, moral and political philosophy, global ethics, and international relations.” In response to lobbying by universities and scholarly associations, Title VIII was resuscitated earlier this year, but it came back at less than half its previous funding level and with future appropriations left uncertain. Given the mounting challenges that Washington faces in Russia and eastern Europe, now seems to be an especially odd time to reduce federal support for educating the next cohort of experts. The rise of the United States as a global power was the product of more than merely economic and military advantages. Where the country was truly hegemonic was in its unmatched knowledge of the hidden interior of other nations: their languages and cultures, their histories and political systems, their local economies and human geographies. Through programs such as Title VIII, the U.S. government created a remarkable community of minutemen of the mind: scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates who possessed the linguistic skills, historical sensitivity, and sheer intellectual curiosity to peer deeply into foreign societies. Policymakers sometimes learned to listen to them, and not infrequently, these scholars even became policymakers themselves. That knowledge flourished in an environment defined by some of the great innovations of American higher education: unfettered inquiry, the assessment of scholarship via rigorous peer review, the expectation that the value of discovery lies somewhere other than in its immediate usefulness, and the link between original research and innovative teaching. If you want evidence-based expertise on terrorism in Pakistan, environmental degradation in China, or local politics in provincial Russia, there is someone in an American university who can provide it. It is harder to imagine a Pakistani scholar who knows Nebraska, a Chinese researcher who can speak with authority about the revival of Detroit, or a Russian professor who wields original survey data on the next U.S. presidential race. But things are changing. Shifting priorities at the national level, a misreading of the effects of globalization, and academics’ own drift away from knowing real things about real places have combined to weaken this vital component of the United States’ intellectual capital. Educational institutions and the disciplines they preserve are retreating from the task of cultivating men and women who are comfortable moving around the globe, both literally and figuratively. Government agencies, in turn, are reducing their overall support and narrowing it to fields deemed relevant to U.S. national security—and even to specific research topics within them. Worse, academic research is now subject to the same “culture war” attacks that federal lawmakers used to reserve for profane rap lyrics and blasphemous artwork. Unless Washington stops this downward spiral, these changes will not only weaken national readiness. They will also erode the habit of mind that good international affairs education was always supposed to produce: an appreciation for people, practices, and ideas that are not one’s own. GERALD R. FORD SCHOOL OF PUBLIC POLICY / FLICKR University of Michigan students videoconference with the USAID director for Mexico, August 2014. LOST IN TRANSLATION? Americans naturally swing between isolation and engagement with the world, but it is government that has usually nudged them in one direction or the other. A century ago, rates of foreign-language study in Europe and the United States were about the same, with roughly a third of secondary school students in both places learning a modern foreign language. After the United States entered World War I, however, almost half the U.S. states criminalized the teaching of German or other foreign languages in schools. It took a Supreme Court decision in 1923 to overturn that practice. During World War II, the U.S. government made attempts to train up linguists and instant area experts, but these initiatives quickly faded. It was not until the onset of the Cold War that private universities such as Columbia and Harvard devoted serious attention to the problem and opened pioneering programs for Russian studies. The Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations launched grants for scholars working specifically on Soviet politics, history, or economics. Only in the late 1950s did the focus on what is now known as internationalization become a national priority—a response to the Sputnik scare and the sense that the Soviets could soon gain superiority in fields well beyond science and technology. The National Defense Education Act of 1958, followed by the Higher Education Act of 1965 and its successors, provided special funding for regional studies and advanced language training for American graduate students. Among other measures, the legislation created a network of National Resource Centers located at major U.S. universities, which in turn ran master’s programs and other forms of instruction to train the next generation of specialists. In 2010, the total size of this allocation, known as Title VI, stood at $110 million, distributed across programs for East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Russia and Eurasia, and other areas. Along with the Fulbright-Hays scholarships for international academic exchanges, established in 1961, Title VI became one of the principal sources of funding for future political scientists, historians, linguists, anthropologists, and others working on distinct world regions. On the face of it, that investment seems to have paid off. American universities have emerged as among the world’s most globally minded. No U.S. college president can long survive without developing a strategy for further internationalization. New schools for specialized study have sprung up across the United States—for example, the University of Oklahoma’s College of International Studies, founded in 2011, and Indiana University’s School of Global and International Studies, which opened in 2012. Older centers—including Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs—consistently top world rankings. The U.S. example has become the model for a raft of new institutions around the world, such as the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, founded in 2003 and 2004, respectively, and the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, founded in 2010. Education and research are now less national priorities than objects of political jockeying. True, young Americans can play video games with their peers in Cairo, chat online with friends in St. Petersburg, and download music from a punk band based in Beijing. But consuming the world is not the same as understanding it. After a steady expansion over two decades, enrollment in foreign-language courses at U.S. colleges fell by 6.7 percent between 2009 and 2013. Most language programs experienced double-digit losses. Even Spanish—a language chosen by more U.S. students than all other languages combined—has suffered its first decline since the Modern Language Association began keeping count in 1958. Today, the third most studied language in U.S. higher education, behind Spanish and French, is a homegrown one: American Sign Language. Something similar has happened in the unlikeliest of places: among professional scholars of international relations. According to an annual survey conducted by the College of William and Mary, 30 percent of American researchers in the field say that they have a working knowledge of no language other than English, and more than half say that they rarely or never cite non-English sources in their work. (Forty percent, however, rank Chinese as the most valuable language for their students to know after English.) At least within the United States, the remarkable growth in the study of international relations in recent decades has produced one of the academy’s more parochial disciplines. Part of the problem lies in the professoriate. An iron law of academia holds that, with time, all disciplines bore even themselves. English professors drift away from novels and toward literary theory. Economists envy mathematicians. Political scientists give up grappling with dilemmas of power and governance—the concerns of thinkers from Aristotle to Max Weber and Hans Morgenthau—and make their own pastiche of the natural sciences with careful hypotheses about minute problems. Being monumentally wrong is less attractive than being unimpor­tantly right. Research questions derive almost exclusively from what has gone unsaid in some previous scholarly conversation. As any graduate student learns early on, one must first “fill a hole in the literature” and only later figure out whether it was worth filling. Doctoral programs also do a criminally poor job of teaching young scholars to write and speak in multiple registers—that is, use jargon with their peers if necessary but then explain their findings to a broader audience with equal zeal and effectiveness. Still, the cultishness of the American academy can be overstated. Today, younger scholars of Russia and Eurasia, for example, have language skills and local knowledge that are the envy of their older colleagues—in part because of decades of substantial federal investment in the field and in part because many current students actually hail from the region and have chosen to make their careers in American universities. Even the increasing quantification of political science can be a boon when abstract concepts are combined with grass-roots understanding of specific contexts. Statistical modeling, field experiments, and “big data” have revolutionized areas as diverse as development economics, public health, and product marketing. There is no reason that similar techniques shouldn’t enrich the study of international affairs, and the private sector is already forging ahead in that area. Companies such as Dataminr—a start-up that analyzes social-media postings for patterns to detect breaking news—now track everything from environmental crises to armed conflict. Foreign policy experts used to debate the causes of war. Now they can see them unspooling in real time. The deeper problems are matters of money and partisan politics. In an Internet-connected world infused with global English, private funders have radically scaled back their support for work that requires what the political scientist Richard Fenno called “soaking and poking”: studying difficult languages, living in unfamiliar communities, and making sense of complex histories and cultures. Very few of the major U.S. foundations finance international and regional studies on levels approaching those of two decades ago. Foundation boards, influenced by the modish language of disruption and social entrepreneurship, want projects with actionable ideas and measurable impact. Over the short term, serious investments in building hard-to-acquire skills are unlikely to yield either. And these developments don’t represent a mere shift from the study of Russia and Eurasia to a focus on the Middle East and East Asia—a pivot that would be reasonable given changes in global politics. The Carnegie Corporation of New York, for example, ended its prestigious senior fellowship program on Muslim societies in 2009 and wound down its wider Islam Initiative shortly thereafter. The U.S. government has followed suit. The suspension of Title VIII was only the latest in a series of cutbacks. The Foreign Language Assistance Program, created in 1988 to provide local schools with matching grants from the Department of Education for teaching foreign languages, ended in 2012. The previous year, Title VI funding for university-based regional studies fell by 40 percent and has flatlined since. If today’s Title VI appropriation were funded at the level it was during the Johnson administration, then it would total almost half a billion dollars after adjusting for inflation. Instead, the 2014 number stood at slightly below $64 million. The same thing has happened with direct funding to undergraduates and graduate students, particularly when it comes to the National Security Education Program (NSEP), which offers students financial assistance for foreign-language study and cultural immersion. NSEP was established in 1991 on the initiative of David Boren, then a Democratic senator from Oklahoma, with the goal of training a new, post–Cold War generation of foreign affairs specialists. The program’s signature elements—Boren Scholarships and Boren Fellowships—offer grants of up to $30,000 to highly qualified undergraduates and graduate students in exchange for at least a year of federal government service in national security after graduation. For all its prestige, however, and despite nominal support among both liberals and conservatives, the Boren program offers fewer such awards today than it did in the mid-1990s. Scholarly research in global affairs, especially work funded by the National Science Foundation, has come under growing attack. Another element of NSEP is an innovative initiative for heritage speakers—American citizens who possess native abilities in a foreign language and wish to develop professional-level skills in English—and it, too, has shrunk. The initiative has never been able to fund more than 40 people per year, most of them native speakers of Arabic or Mandarin, and the number has been steadily falling, reaching just 18 in 2014. (This program is now housed at Georgetown University, where I teach.) In a somewhat encouraging sign, enrollment has been growing markedly in NSEP’s Language Flagship program, which gives grants to colleges to field advanced courses in languages deemed important for national security. But the raw numbers reveal just how small the United States’ next generation of linguists actually is. Last year, the total number of students enrolled in NSEP-sponsored courses for all the “critical languages”—Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Swahili, Turkish, Urdu, and Yoruba—was under a thousand. In tandem with these trends, scholarly research in global affairs, especially work funded by the National Science Foundation, has come under growing attack. The annual appropriation for the NSF is around $7.3 billion, of which a fraction—less than $260 million—goes to the behavioral, social, and economic sciences. Of that figure, only about $13 million goes to political scientists, and an even smaller amount goes to those doing research on international affairs. Still, these scholars now receive the kind of lambasting that used to be directed mainly against the National Endowment for the Arts. As just one example, for the past two years, the NSF has been the particular focus of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, which oversees the foundation along with portions of the Federal Aviation Administration, NASA, and other agencies. The committee intends to subject all NSF-funded projects to a relevance test that would require the foundation to certify that every taxpayer dollar is spent “in the national interest.” In a recent opinion piece for The Hill, Lamar Smith, the Republican representative from Texas who chairs the committee, pilloried NSF-funded researchers working on the environmental history of New Zealand, women and Islam in Turkey, and local politics in India. “How about studying the United States of America?” he wrote. “Federal research agencies have an obligation to explain to American taxpayers why their money is being used to provide free foreign vacations to college professors.” In response to this kind of criticism, academic associations have hired their own lobbyists—a recognition of the fact that education and research are now less national priorities than objects of political jockeying, on par with items on the wish lists of private corporations and interest groups. The crusade for relevance is part of a broader development: the growing militarization of government-funded scholarship. Researchers in international and regional studies have always doffed a hat to strategic priorities. Even historians and literature professors became accustomed to touting their work’s policy significance when they applied for federal grants and fellowships. But today, a substantial portion of assistance comes directly from the U.S. Department of Defense. The department’s Minerva Initiative provides support for research on “areas of strategic importance to U.S. national security policy” and for “projects addressing specific topic areas determined by the Secretary of Defense,” as the call for applications says. In the current three-year cycle, which runs until 2017, the program expects to disburse $17 million to university-based researchers in the social sciences. Millions more have been allocated since the first round began in 2009. MILLER CENTER / FLICKR Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright delivers a talk at the University of Virginia, February 2013. But there is a substantial difference between research that broadly supports the national interest and work that directly enhances national security. Developing new techniques for teaching Arabic and Chinese, for example, or analyzing EU regulatory policy is the former without necessarily being the latter. When scholars need research money and Washington needs actionable analysis, the danger is that the meaning of the term “national security” can balloon beyond any reasonable definition. Even more worrying, in an era of real transnational threats, knowledge that used to be thought of as the purview of the police—say, how to manage a mass protest and deter crime—can easily slide into matters of surveilling and soldiering. Congressional staff could spend their time on things other than trips to the NSF archives to root out recondite research topics for public ridicule. It was once the case that state-supported research was meant to give the United States an edge in its relations with other countries. Now, with programs such as Minerva, the temptation is to give government an edge over the governed. Recent Minerva projects have focused on the origins of mass political movements, “radicalization” among Somali refugees in Minnesota, and—in the words of one project summary—“the study of Islamic conversion in America,” aimed at providing “options for governments to use for the tasking of surveillance.” Professors funded by Minerva work with project managers at U.S. military research facilities, who in turn report to the secretary of defense, who has by definition found the research topics to be matters of strategic concern. In an incentive structure that rewards an emphasis on countering global threats and securing the homeland, the devil lies in the definitions. In this framework, the Boston Marathon bombing becomes a national security problem, whereas the Sandy Hook massacre remains a matter for the police and psychologists—a distinction that is both absurd as social science and troubling as public policy. THE PRICE OF GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT Things could be different. Funding for foreign-language study, cultural immersion, and advanced inquiry could be a federal priority, with funding levels restored to what they were in previous years. Research and teaching could be placed at one remove from the national security apparatus, as they are in the Department of Education’s model for Title VI or in a public trust along the lines of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The creation of knowledge and its communication through instruction could be made immune from “gotcha” politics. And congressional staff members could spend their time on things other than trips to the NSF archives to root out recondite research topics for public ridicule. At the same time, universities have their own part to play. Disciplines can, and do, go haywire. Researchers and graduate students should be judged not by how well they embed themselves in a scholarly mainstream but by how truly original and world-connected they aim to be. Fundable scholarship should not be reduced to a narrow matter of national security. But it is hard to see why anyone would make a career of international affairs—a pursuit that begins with valuing people, cultures, and polities in all their diversity—without some commitment to serving the public interest. You have read 1 of 2 of your free articles this month Subscribe now and save 55%! SUBSCRIBE NOW Related Tweets Given that no one can know where the next crisis will erupt, having a broadly competent reserve of experts is the price of global engagement. Yesterday’s apparent irrelevancies—the demographics of eastern Ukraine, for example, or popular attitudes toward public health in West Africa—can suddenly become matters of consequence. Acquiring competence in these sorts of topics forms the mental disposition that J. William Fulbright called “seeing the world as others see it”—an understanding that people could reasonably view their identities, interests, politics, and leaders in ways that might at first seem bizarre or wrong-headed. It also provides the essential context for distinguishing smart policy-specific questions from misguided ones. Great powers should revel in small data: the granular and culture-specific knowledge that can make the critical difference between really getting a place and getting it profoundly wrong. International affairs education and research are also part of a country’s domestic life. Democratic societies depend on having a cadre of informed professionals outside government—people in universities, think tanks, museums, and research institutes who cultivate expertise protected from the pressures of the state. Many countries can field missile launchers and float destroyers; only a few have built a Brookings Institution or a Chatham House. Yet the latter is what makes them magnets for people from the very places their institutions study. The University of London’s nearly century-old SOAS, for example, which focuses on Asian and African studies, is a beehive of languages and causes, where Koreans, Nigerians, and Palestinians come to receive world-class instruction on, among other things, North and South Korea, Nigeria, and the Palestinian territories. All of this points to just how important international and regional studies can be when they are adequately funded, publicly valued, and shielded from the exigencies of national security. Their chief role is not to enable the makers of foreign policy. It is rather to constrain them: to show why things will always be more complicated than they seem, how to foresee unintended consequences, and when to temper ambition with a realistic understanding of what is historically and culturally imaginable. For more than half a century, the world has been shaped by the simple fact that the United States could look at other countries—their pasts and presents, their myths and worldviews—with sympathetic curiosity. Maintaining the ability to do so is not only a great power’s insurance policy against the future. It is also the essence of an open, inquisitive, and critical society.

What Is The Point Of A University Degree, Anyway?

Years ago as a young buck, I sat on the university commons grass and pondered WTF it was all about. I made an immediate decision that I no longer cared what others thought of me. My mind would only be focused on things that were important to me. Secondly, I questioned the strict educational requirements for a degree and determined that I would focus on learning only from the very best professors on campus, and let the degree qualification chips fall where they may. This led me to two minors in philosophy and photography, and not much concern about fitting into corporate requirements for a job.  In the end, I came out only one-half credit off, and arm wrestled with the Academic VP over one semester of volleyball, which, coming from southern California, I actually loved.  I got the real education I wanted, and ironically also managed to secure employment with one of the best new companies in the country.  Later, my Harvard MBA colleagues would say to me that they envied my education, and I would tell them that I envied their Harvard MBA’s.  In the end, neither mattered.

This opinion piece from the New York Times Sunday Review caught my eye, and after reading it I share the views of the author. In my university teaching experience, I have seen many of the same things mentioned by the author, particularly a greater focus on jobs, less emphasis on excellence in their area of focus, and the dramatic inflation in grading.  When I was in university an “A” was at least 90% or above. When I started teaching I was shocked to learn that the bar for an “A” had been lowered to 80%. It seems that there are now an infinite number of variations of an “A” spanning 20 percentage points. I well remember my own experience at Oxford with ” first, upper second or second class” degree awards. A “first,” a la Stephen Hawking or Alan Turing is to this day an extraordinary accomplishment.  I was shocked by the grading dilution and then began asking some of my industry colleagues their experience from university. They were equally shocked by the dilution of an “A”.  Then I had students arguing with me and complaining to the Dean about their 80% “A” because it lowered their overall GPA.  With regard to those students who have sought me out for additional “out of class” advice, counseling and guidance, I am pleased to say that I have a small group of students who have used me very effectively to advance their learning and their careers. Some have continued to do so even after leaving university. At the same time, that number mirrors the smaller numbers seeking guidance and tutoring. As higher education inexorably moves more toward remote online learning, I worry about the consequences.

What’s the Point of a Professor?

By MARK BAUERLEINMAY 9, 2015

Reblogged from the New York Times Sunday Review, Opinion

ATLANTA — IN the coming weeks, two million Americans will earn a bachelor’s degree and either join the workforce or head to graduate school. They will be joyous that day, and they will remember fondly the schools they attended. But as this unique chapter of life closes and they reflect on campus events, one primary part of higher education will fall low on the ladder of meaningful contacts: the professors.

That’s what students say. Oh, they’re quite content with their teachers; after all, most students receive sure approval. In 1960, only 15 percent of grades were in the “A” range, but now the rate is 43 percent, making “A” the most common grade by far.

Faculty members’ attitudes are kindly, too. In one national survey, 61 percent of students said that professors frequently treated them “like a colleague/peer,” while only 8 percent heard frequent “negative feedback about their academic work.” More than half leave the graduation ceremony believing that they are “well prepared” in speaking, writing, critical thinking and decision-making.

But while they’re content with teachers, students aren’t much interested in them as thinkers and mentors. They enroll in courses and complete assignments, but further engagement is minimal.

One measure of interest in what professors believe, what wisdom they possess apart from the content of the course, is interaction outside of class. It’s often during incidental conversations held after the bell rings and away from the demands of the syllabus that the transfer of insight begins and a student’s emulation grows. Students email teachers all the time — why walk across campus when you can fire a note from your room? — but those queries are too curt for genuine mentoring. We need face time.

Here, though, are the meager numbers. For a majority of undergraduates, beyond the two and a half hours per week in class, contact ranges from negligible to nonexistent. In their first year, 33 percent of students report that they never talk with professors outside of class while 42 percent do so only sometimes. Seniors lower that disengagement rate only a bit, with 25 percent never talking to professors, and 40 percent sometimes.

It hasn’t always been this way. “I revered many of my teachers,” Todd Gitlin said when we met at the New York Public Library last month. He’s a respected professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia, but in the 1960s he was a fiery working-class kid at Harvard before becoming president of Students for a Democratic Society.

I asked if student unrest back then included disregard of the faculty. Not at all, he said. Nobody targeted professors. Militants attacked the administration for betraying what the best professors embodied, the free inquisitive space of the Ivory Tower.

I saw the same thing in my time at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the early 1980s, when you couldn’t walk down the row of faculty offices without stepping over the outstretched legs of English majors lining up for consultations. First-year classes could be as large as 400, but by junior year you settled into a field and got to know a few professors well enough to chat with them regularly, and at length. We knew, and they knew, that these moments were the heart of liberal education.

In our hunger for guidance, we were ordinary. The American Freshman Survey, which has followed students since 1966, proves the point. One prompt in the questionnaire asks entering freshmen about “objectives considered to be essential or very important.” In 1967, 86 percent of respondents checked “developing a meaningful philosophy of life,” more than double the number who said “being very well off financially.”

Naturally, students looked to professors for moral and worldly understanding. Since then, though, finding meaning and making money have traded places. The first has plummeted to 45 percent; the second has soared to 82 percent.

I returned to U.C.L.A. on a mild afternoon in February and found the hallways quiet and dim. Dozens of 20-year-olds strolled and chattered on the quad outside, but in the English department, only one in eight doors was open, and barely a half dozen of the department’s 1,400 majors waited for a chance to speak.

When college is more about career than ideas, when paycheck matters more than wisdom, the role of professors changes. We may be 50-year-olds at the front of the room with decades of reading, writing, travel, archives or labs under our belts, with 80 courses taught, but students don’t lie in bed mulling over what we said. They have no urge to become disciples.

Sadly, professors pressed for research time don’t want them, either. As a result, most undergraduates never know that stage of development when a learned mind enthralled them and they progressed toward a fuller identity through admiration of and struggle with a role model.

Since the early 2000s, I have made students visit my office every other week with a rough draft of an essay. We appraise and revise the prose, sentence by sentence. I ask for a clearer idea or a better verb; I circle a misplaced modifier and wait as they make the fix.

As I wait, I sympathize: So many things distract them — the gym, text messages, rush week — and often campus culture treats them as customers, not pupils. Student evaluations and ratemyprofessor.com paint us as service providers. Years ago at Emory University, where I work, a campus-life dean addressed new students with a terrible message: Don’t go too far into coursework — there’s so much more to do here! And yet, I find, my writing sessions help diminish those distractions, and by the third meeting students have a new attitude. This is a teacher who rejects my worst and esteems my best thoughts and words, they say to themselves.

You can’t become a moral authority if you rarely challenge students in class and engage them beyond it. If we professors do not do that, the course is not an induction of eager minds into an enlarging vision. It is a requirement to fulfill. Only our assistance with assignments matters. When it comes to students, we shall have only one authority: the grades we give. We become not a fearsome mind or a moral light, a role model or inspiration. We become accreditors.

The Heavily Discounted Value of a University Degree. What Has Happened?

When I graduated from a prestigious public university in California, my future was so bright I had to wear shades. Even with a seemingly worthless degree in the Humanities and Social Sciences, I managed to quickly land an entry-level management position at Intel Corporation, which became a rocket ride into the top marketing unit in the company, heavily populated with Ivy League MBA’s.  I also gained extensive international business experience which fueled my later career.  My former students know that I have repeatedly said in class and in student meetings that this would simply not happen today.  Employers today are swamped with applications from literally hundreds and thousands of graduates with credentials far better than mine at that time.  I know of one top graduate from UBC Faculty of Management from a few years ago, who entered the job market with very high hopes and expectations, but is still struggling to move beyond low paying hourly employment.  What has happened?

Robert Reich, Former U.S. Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, and currently Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, details the problems with the economic value of university degree.  The points Reich makes are as relevant in Canada as in the United States.  “People with college degrees continue to earn far more than people without them. And that college “premium” keeps rising.  Last year, Americans with four-year college degrees earned on average 98 percent more per hour than people without college degrees.  In the early 1980s, graduates earned 64 percent more. So even though college costs are rising, the financial return to a college degree compared to not having one is rising even faster.”  So far so good.

Reich concludes, “But here’s the qualification, and it’s a big one. A college degree no longer guarantees a good job. The main reason it pays better than the job of someone without a degree is the latter’s wages are dropping,”  The value of a degree is actually decreasing.  This is the same economic inequality problem affecting all other aspects of the economy.  The very best of our graduates, those who are the most resourceful and motivated, will manage to succeed, but the vast majority will be on a slippery slope.  I have seen this in my time at UBC, and most students can look around and see the problem among their classmates.

Reposted from Salon, Tuesday, November 25, 2014:

Robert Reich: College gets you nowhere

The former secretary of labor examines why a degree no longer guarantees a well-playing job

ROBERT REICH, ROBERTREICH.ORG

 

This is the time of year when high school seniors apply to college, and when I get lots of mail about whether college is worth the cost.

The answer is unequivocally yes, but with one big qualification. I’ll come to the qualification in a moment but first the financial case for why it’s worth going to college.

Put simply, people with college degrees continue to earn far more than people without them. And that college “premium” keeps rising.

Last year, Americans with four-year college degrees earned on average 98 percent more per hour than people without college degrees.

In the early 1980s, graduates earned 64 percent more.

So even though college costs are rising, the financial return to a college degree compared to not having one is rising even faster.

But here’s the qualification, and it’s a big one.

A college degree no longer guarantees a good job. The main reason it pays better than the job of someone without a degree is the latter’s wages are dropping.

In fact, it’s likely that new college graduates will spend some years in jobs for which they’re overqualified.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 46 percent of recent college graduates are now working in jobs that don’t require college degrees. (The same is true for more than a third of college graduates overall.)

Their employers still choose college grads over non-college grads on the assumption that more education is better than less.

As a result, non-grads are being pushed into ever more menial work, if they can get work at all. Which is a major reason why their pay is dropping.

What’s going on? For years we’ve been told globalization and technological advances increase the demand for well-educated workers. (Confession: I was one of the ones making this argument.)

This was correct until around 2000. But since then two things have reversed the trend.

First, millions of people in developing nations are now far better educated, and the Internet has given them an easy way to sell their skills in advanced economies like the United States. Hence, more and more complex work is being outsourced to them.

Second, advanced software is taking over many tasks that had been done by well-educated professionals – including data analysis, accounting, legal and engineering work, even some medical diagnoses.

As a result, the demand for well-educated workers in the United States seems to have peaked around 2000 and fallen since. But the supply of well-educated workers has continued to grow.

What happens when demand drops and supply increases? You guessed it. This is why the incomes of young people who graduated college after 2000 have barely risen.

Those just within the top ten percent of college graduate earnings have seen their incomes increase by only 4.4 percent since 2000.

When it comes to beginning their careers, it’s even worse. The starting wages of college graduates have actually dropped since 2000. The starting wage of women grads has dropped 8.1 percent, and for men, 6.7 percent.

I hear it all the time from my former students. The New York Times calls them “Generation Limbo” — well-educated young adults “whose careers are stuck in neutral, coping with dead-end jobs and listless prospects.” A record number are living at home.

The deeper problem is this. While a college education is now a prerequisite for joining the middle class, the middle class is in lousy shape. Its share of the total economic pie continues to shrink, while the share going to the very top continues to grow.

Given all this, a college degree is worth the cost because it at least enables a young person to tread water. Without the degree, young people can easily drown.

Some young college graduates will make it into the top 1 percent. But that route is narrower than ever. The on-ramp often requires the right connections (especially parents well inside the top 1 percent).

And the off-ramps basically go in only three directions: Wall Street, corporate consulting, and Silicon Valley.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe the main reason to go to college – or to choose one career over another — should be to make lots of money.

Hopefully, a college education gives young people tools for leading full and purposeful lives, and having meaningful careers.

Even if they don’t change the world for the better, I want my students to be responsible and engaged citizens.

But when considering a college education in a perilous economy like this, it’s also important to know the economics.

 

Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. Time Magazine has named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written 13 books, including his latest best-seller, “Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future;” “The Work of Nations,” which has been translated into 22 languages; and his newest, an e-book, “Beyond Outrage.” His syndicated columns, television appearances, and public radio commentaries reach millions of people each week. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, and Chairman of the citizen’s group Common Cause. His new movie “Inequality for All” is in Theaters. His widely-read blog can be found at www.robertreich.org.

 

John Sperling, University of Phoenix Founder, Dies at 93

 

 

 

I had the great good fortune to know Professor John Sperling, Cambridge don, when I was an undergraduate student at San Jose State University.  At that time, our campus was awash in great thinkers: visiting scholars Buckminster Fuller, Alan Watts, and a host of other eminent faculty. I knew Sperling as a friend and mentor, and worked closely with John and my friends with the SJSU student government: Dick Miner, Peter Ellis and others, some of whom went on to work with Sperling at the Institute of Professional Development and later at the University of Phoenix. My fondest recollection of John was as the catalyst for our symbolic burial of an ugly yellow Ford Maverick on the first Earth Day.  John challenged us to define ourselves by what we would do to mark that day.  It has become one of the defining events of the first Earth Day.  But I also view John as the precursor of the current MOOC’s movement. John shook up the academic world with his revolutionary ideas about education.  John created immense controversy but he also spawned significant change. Regrettably, over the years, Phoenix has turned into a questionable “for profit” education mill, akin to Trump University, and now the subject of a federal lawsuit for defrauding military veterans.

From the Arizona Republic:

John Sperling, a virtual illiterate as a teenager, learned to love learning as a young adult and went on to revolutionize the business of college education and access to it by creating the for-profit University of Phoenix.

His death at 93 on Friday was announced Sunday on the website of Apollo Education Group, the University of Phoenix’s parent company. A cause of death was not listed.

Sperling, a billionaire with homes in the San Francisco Bay Area and Phoenix, was remembered for his vision and his tenacity in support of adult education and numerous other causes that engaged his passion. Although he kept a low profile in Arizona, his philanthropy supported a variety of causes, from solar research to anti-aging efforts to the decriminalization of marijuana.

Sperling’s son, Apollo Group Board Chairman Peter Sperling, and company CEO Greg Cappelli said in the statement that “Dr. Sperling’s indomitable ideas and life’s work served as a catalyst for innovations widely accepted as having made higher education more accessible to adult students.”

Sperling founded the chain of schools in the 1970s and retired as executive chairman from its parent company in 2012. On his watch, the school grew from a small California operation to a publicly traded Fortune 500 company with 12,000 workers in Arizona. It established itself as the national leader in adult education and online classes.

Sperling’s schools often catered to older students wanting classes at more flexible hours. By tapping a demographic niche that traditional schools missed or didn’t want, Sperling elbowed the University of Phoenix into a lasting place in the often-staid world of higher education. But by the time he retired, the University of Phoenix had become a sometimes-controversial symbol of the rapid growth and excesses of for-profit universities.

The financial success of the University of Phoenix allowed Sperling to bankroll his social initiatives, from advocating medical marijuana to seeking to clone his dog.

“University of Phoenix is my proudest legacy,” Sperling said in a 2011 interview withThe Republic. “Knowing that over 1million staff, faculty and students have benefited in some way from the university is something I’m very proud of.”

“I think everyone will agree John Sperling really shook up the higher-education world,” said William Tierney, a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California and co-author of the book “New Players, Different Game: Understanding the Rise of For-Profit Colleges and Universities.”

“Sperling realized a need that the market had not thought about and the public sector frankly didn’t care about, and man, was he right,” Tierney said in a 2013 interview. “He really tapped into education as a needed commodity in a way that nobody else had done.”

A singular vision

Those who knew him well described Sperling as a man of generosity, curiosity, vision and grit.

“His focus was on bettering people’s lives,” said Jorge Klor de Alva, a former University of Phoenix president and Apollo Group senior vice president who knew Sperling for more than 40 years. “This university was focused on trying to help people succeed.”

Klor de Alva said Sperling, essentially shy, never backed down from a fight.

“He was always in pursuit of social-justice causes,” Klor de Alva said.

Grant Woods, a former Arizona attorney general and attorney who represented Apollo Education Group, said Sperling was ahead of his time with his views on many topics, including treatment for drug offenders, instead of incarceration, and the benefits of telemedicine.

“Professionally I was impressed with how visionary he was,” Woods said. “He was willing to be controversial, to fight the fights that most people wouldn’t fight. He was never afraid to put his money and his prestige behind them.”

Sperling invested heavily into causes including plant genetics and seawater agriculture, anti-aging medicine and drug decriminalization as opposed to treatment. He participated in efforts with fellow billionaires George Soros and Peter Lewis to sponsor and pass citizen-backed initiatives in 17 states focusing on treatment and education, as opposed to jail time, for non-violent offenders, while decriminalizing marijuana, especially for medical purposes.

U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a fellow Bay area resident, said in a statement: “John Sperling’s passion for education changed America. By improving access to higher education for thousands of non-traditional students, he created a movement and empowered a generation of working adults with the tools needed to provide a better quality of life for their families. His life story inspires us to see — and seize — opportunities.”

Humble beginnings

Sperling achieved his perch atop for-profit education after escaping a humble, sickly and unhappy childhood.

In his autobiography, “Rebel With a Cause,” Sperling wrote that he was the youngest of five children. He was born in a log cabin in Missouri and raised in a home that had a coal-burning stove and an outhouse. He said his mother was “possessively loving” and described his father as a “classic ne’er-do-well” who often beat him.

“I learned nothing from my childhood except that it’s a mean world out there, and you’ve got to bite and scratch to get by,” he told Fast Company in a 2003 interview.

Sperling joined the Merchant Marine in 1939, and one of his ship’s engineers befriended him, teaching Sperling to read. Sperling was spellbound by classics such as “Notes from the Underground” and “The Great Gatsby,” fueling a lifelong love of literature and poetry.

After serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps, Sperling earned an undergraduate degree from Reed College on the G.I. Bill. He then attended the University of California-Berkeley, where he was awarded a fellowship to study at King’s College at the University of Cambridge. He earned his doctorate in 18th-century English mercantile history in 1955.

Starting in 1960, Sperling served for 12 years as a tenured professor of history at San Jose State University.

There, Sperling made a name as a union activist.

Popular program

While still teaching in San Jose, in 1974 Sperling won a government contract to develop coursework for teachers and police officers who worked with at-risk children.

According to New Yorker magazine, top administrators at San Jose State balked at the program. The University of San Francisco was more receptive, so he launched it there.

The program proved so popular that Sperling, working with business partners, created an adult-education program for 2,500 students with classes available at Bay Area colleges. It became known as the Institute for Professional Development and offered bachelor’s and master’s degrees for its students.

“He got this thing going, and it was making money. It was running a surplus,” said David Breneman, a University of Virginia professor who teaches the economics of education. “The regional accrediting body in California came down on him like a ton of bricks. They didn’t like anything he was doing.”

Sperling responded in 1976 by moving the IPD and renaming it after its new home: the University of Phoenix. Within three years, it gained grudging accreditation in Arizona.

Sperling told The Republic that Arizona attracted him because the state “had never gotten around to writing any regulations.”

With his background in economics, Sperling draped his university in pragmatic cost-consciousness. Instructors were drawn from the working world. Accountants, for example, taught accounting rather than decorated academics.

Students presumably benefited from the instructors’ real-world experience; Sperling and the students gained from the lower faculty salaries that went with it.

In 1981, Sperling formed the Apollo Group, the parent company of the university, and bought out one of his partners. Seven years later, Sperling bought out another partner to take full control of Apollo.

As the university fell under his full control, it also began developing distance-learning classes, a forerunner to the online courses that would help remake adult education.

For years, the University of Phoenix grew steadily, largely on the strength of an older student body looking to start new careers. At a time when traditional schools made students build schedules around faculty, Sperling built his no-frills school around the students.

In December 1994, the Apollo Group joined the Nasdaq Stock Market as a publicly traded company. At the time, it had 28,000 students. In some ways, it was a final vindication of Sperling’s unique approach to higher education. But some say it also put the school on a new path that inevitably led to a shift in priorities.

“They got pushed by Wall Street,” said Breneman, who co-edited the book “Earnings from Learning: The Rise of For-Profit Universities.” “They got into this rat race of having to try to grow 10, 20, 30percent every year, so they started dipping down into younger students.”

By 2000, enrollment in the Apollo Group’s holdings reached 100,000. Three years later, it was 200,000. By 2010, enrollment had mushroomed to 600,000.

At that point, more than 80 percent of the university’s revenue source was federally backed student loans. In 2008, for example, it collected more than $3billion in federal financial aid.

That attracted scrutiny from Washington. On Capitol Hill, the university and its many for-profit competitors came under fire for bringing in too many students ill-prepared for college who, if they graduated at all, found themselves saddled with high debt and poor job prospects. The high dropout rates were fueled, some said, by recruiters whose pay was effectively tied to enrollment, which would violate federal law.

In 2009, the Apollo Group settled a whistle-blower lawsuit against the university for nearly $80million to dispense with claims of recruiting commissions.

A two-year Senate investigation pointed out in 2012 that an online degree from the University of Phoenix cost six times more than a comparable degree from the Maricopa Community College system and that Sperling was paid $8.6million in 2009, 13 times more than the president of the University of Arizona.

“When the University of Phoenix was started in 1976, it pioneered an entirely new model of learning,” the report concluded. “That model revolutionized thinking about how to provide opportunities for higher education to underserved and non-traditional students. Yet in the 2000s, Apollo appears to have made critical decisions that prioritized financial success over student success.”

During the probe, Washington tightened lending rules to hold schools accountable for the degrees their students pursued, and the university made its own adjustments, though Sperling, with characteristic bluntness, disagreed.

“We don’t agree with the new regulations. We think they are stupid,” he told The Republic in 2011.

Operating under tighter regulations, an uncertain economy and intense competition from other for-profit schools and public universities that had learned from Sperling’s model, the University of Phoenix contracted. It has cut its payrolls by thousands, and degreed enrollment in May was 242,000.

Sperling left as CEO of the Apollo Group in 2001 and retired as executive chairman of the company’s board of directors in December 2012.

Variety of causes

In 1996, Sperling gained attention as a financial backer of medical marijuana in Arizona, something he favored during his recovery from prostate cancer in the late 1970s.

In 2000, he funded a biotech company to help clone pets. His dog Missy died in 2002 without success in cloning her. Four years later, the company was shuttered.

Between 1997 and 2013, Sperling made more than $700,000 in political contributions, according to federal records. Overwhelmingly, but not totally, he gave to Democrats. He wrote several books, some on education and one outlining his liberal views on political demographics.

Although he was often at odds with the establishment, most say Sperling left a mark on higher education.

“I think we need to give credit where credit is due,” Tierney said. “There are a lot of others out there, and they didn’t become the University of Phoenix. He had an American kind of can-do spirit.”

Sperling is survived by his longtime companion, Joan Hawthorne; his former wife, Virginia Sperling; his son, Peter; his daughter-in-law, Stephanie; and his two grandchildren, Max and Eve.

Why I stopped teaching

We all have our own reasons why we stopped teaching. Some are voluntary, others involuntary. John Beck discusses many of the uncomfortable issues of evaluation and faculty politics that get in the way of the joy of teaching

Online Business Education? Harvard versus Stanford

Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma

Harvard Professor Michael Porter, author of numerous books on Competitive Strategy

Stanford Graduate School of Business and Harvard Business School are adopting drastically different strategies for delivering business education.  These differing strategies are reflected in the debate that has erupted between two of Harvard Business School’s best known professors and their visions for the future of business education, Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen.  I have also been personally tire kicking MOOC’s, acting as a mentor for Stanford’s online Technology Entrepreneurship course, hosted by NovoEd.  I have been pleasantly surprised by the experience, and among the teams I am mentoring, is a group of Xerox senior research scientists acting as an entrepreneurial team.

Christensen predictably argues, as in his most famous book, that in order to survive disruptive change, businesses themselves must embrace disruptive change. Professor Porter on the other hand, argues that an enterprise “… must stay the course, even in times of upheaval, while constantly improving and extending its distinctive positioning.” Ironically, this debate is closely related to my most recent post, and a much earlier post on recognizing “strategic inflection points,” and acting on them.

Read more: http://mayo615.com/2014/05/15/nimbleness-strategy-or-opportunism/

Read more: http://mayo615.com/2013/08/02/strategic-inflection-points-when-companies-lose-their-way/

Reblogged from the New York Times blog

Business School, Disrupted

By JERRY USEEMMAY 31, 2014

If any institution is equipped to handle questions of strategy, it is Harvard Business School, whose professors have coined so much of the strategic lexicon used in classrooms and boardrooms that it’s hard to discuss the topic without recourse to their concepts: Competitive advantage. Disruptive innovation. The value chain.

But when its dean, Nitin Nohria, faced the school’s biggest strategic decision since 1924 — the year it planned its campus and adopted the case-study method as its pedagogical cornerstone — he ran into an issue. Those professors, and those concepts, disagreed.

The question: Should Harvard Business School enter the business of online education, and, if so, how?

Universities across the country are wrestling with the same question — call it the educator’s quandary — of whether to plunge into the rapidly growing realm of online teaching, at the risk of devaluing the on-campus education for which students pay tens of thousands of dollars, or to stand pat at the risk of being left behind.

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Harvard Business School faced a choice between different models of online instruction. Prof. Michael Porter favored the development of online courses that would reflect the school’s existing strategy.CreditDavid De la Paz/European Press Photo Agency

At Harvard Business School, the pros and cons of the argument were personified by two of its most famous faculty members. For Michael Porter, widely considered the father of modern business strategy, the answer is yes — create online courses, but not in a way that undermines the school’s existing strategy. “A company must stay the course,” Professor Porter has written, “even in times of upheaval, while constantly improving and extending its distinctive positioning.”

For Clayton Christensen, whose 1997 book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” propelled him to academic stardom, the only way that market leaders like Harvard Business School survive “disruptive innovation” is by disrupting their existing businesses themselves. This is arguably what rival business schools like Stanford and the Wharton School have been doing by having professors stand in front of cameras and teach MOOCs, or massive open online courses, free of charge to anyone, anywhere in the world. For a modest investment by the school — about $20,000 to $30,000 a course — a professor can reach a million students, says Karl Ulrich, vice dean for innovation at Wharton, part of the University of Pennsylvania.

“Do it cheap and simple,” Professor Christensen says. “Get it out there.”

But Harvard Business School’s online education program is not cheap, simple, or open. It could be said that the school opted for the Porter theory. Called HBX, the program will make its debut on June 11 and has its own admissions office. Instead of attacking the school’s traditional M.B.A. and executive education programs — which produced revenue of $108 million and $146 million in 2013 — it aims to create an entirely new segment of business education: the pre-M.B.A. “Instead of having two big product lines, we may be on the verge of inventing a third,” said Prof. Jay W. Lorsch, who has taught at Harvard Business School since 1964.

Starting last month, HBX has been quietly admitting several hundred students, mostly undergraduate sophomores, juniors and seniors, into a program called Credential of Readiness, or CORe. The program includes three online courses — accounting, analytics and economics for managers — that are intended to give liberal arts students fluency in what it calls “the language of business.” Students have nine weeks to complete all three courses, and tuition is $1,500. Only those with a high level of class participation will be invited to take a three-hour final exam at a testing center.

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“We don’t want tourists,” said Jana Kierstead, executive director of HBX, alluding to the high dropout rates among MOOCs. “Our goal is to be very credible to employers.” To that end, graduates will receive a paper credential with a grade: high honors, honors, pass.

“Harvard is going to make a lot of money,” Mr. Ulrich predicted. “They will sell a lot of seats at those courses. But those seats are very carefully designed to be off to the side. It’s designed to be not at all threatening to what they’re doing at the core of the business school.”

Exactly, warned Professor Christensen, who said he was not consulted about the project. “What they’re doing is, in my language, a sustaining innovation,” akin to Kodak introducing better film, circa 2005. “It’s not truly disruptive.”

‘Very Different Places’

Professor Christensen did something “truly disruptive” in 2011, when he found himself in a room with a panoramic view of Boston Harbor. About to begin his lecture, he noticed something about the students before him. They were beautiful, he later recalled. Really beautiful.

“Oh, we’re not students,” one of them explained. “We’re models.”

They were there to look as if they were learning: to appear slightly puzzled when Professor Christensen introduced a complex concept, to nod when he clarified it, or to look fascinated if he grew a tad boring. The cameras in the classroom — actually, a rented space downtown — would capture it all for the real audience: roughly 130,000 business students at the University of Phoenix, which hired Professor Christensen to deliver lectures online.

Why had his boss, Mr. Nohria, given him permission to moonlight? “Because we didn’t have an alternative of our own” online, Mr. Nohria explained.

The dean had taken a wait-and-see approach — until 18 months ago, when his own university announced the formation of edX, an open-courseware platform that would hitch the overall university firmly to the MOOC bandwagon.

He said he remembered listening to an edX presentation at an all-university meeting. “I must confess I was unsure what we’d be really hoping to gain from it,” he said. “My own early imagination was: ‘This is for people who do lectures. We don’t do lectures, so this is not for us.’ ” In the case method, concepts aren’t taught directly, but induced through student discussion of real-world business problems that professors guide with carefully chosen questions.

“Nitin and I are close friends, and we’ve talked about this repeatedly,” Professor Porter said. “I think the big risk in any new technology is to believe the technology is the strategy. Just because 200,000 people sign up doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.” Though Professor Porter published “Strategy and the Internet” in the Harvard Business Review in 2001, before the advent of MOOCs, the article makes his sternest warning about the perils of online recklessness: “A destructive, zero-sum form of competition has been set in motion that confuses the acquisition of customers with the building of profitability.”

Mr. Nohria ultimately chose for the business school to opt out of edX. But this decision forced a question: What should the school do instead? “People came out in very different places,” Mr. Nohria said. “Very different places.”

One morning, he sat down for one of his regular breakfasts with students. “Three of them had just been in Clay’s course,” which had included a case study on the future of Harvard Business School, Mr. Nohria said. “So I asked them, ‘What was the debate like, and how would you think about this?’ They, too, split very deeply.”

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Some took Professor Christensen’s view that the school was a potential Blockbuster Video: a high-cost incumbent — students put the total cost of the two-year M.B.A. at around $100,0000 — that would be upended by cheaper technology if it didn’t act quickly to make its own model obsolete. At least one suggested putting the entire first-year curriculum online.

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On the topic of online instruction, Prof. Clayton Christensen said: ‘Do it cheap and simple. Get it out there.”CreditRick Friedman for The New York Times

Others weren’t so sure. “ ‘This disruption is going to happen,’ ” is how Mr. Nohria described their thinking, “ ‘but it’s going to happen to a very different segment of business education, not to us.’ ” The power of Harvard’s brand, networking opportunities and classroom experience would protect it from the fate of second- and third-tier schools, a view that even Professor Christensen endorses — up to a point.

“We’re at the very high end of the market, and disruption always hits the high end last,” said Professor Christensen, who recently predicted that half of the United States’ universities could face bankruptcy within 15 years.

Mr. Nohria states flatly, “I do not believe our M.B.A. program is at risk.” He concluded that disruption is not always “all or nothing,” and cited the businesses of music and retailing as examples. “In the music business, all record stores are gone,” he said, while in retailing, “it’s not like Amazon has eliminated everything; after those debates, my feeling was that we’re going to be more in that category.”

Still, Mr. Nohria said, he wanted some insurance. “Our beliefs can always turn out to be wrong,” he said. Harvard Business School could not afford to stand on the sidelines. So last summer, he said, he asked the business school’s administrative director, “What would you say if we started a little skunk works around this technology?”

‘Hollywood’ at Harvard

That skunk works, in a low-slung building 300 yards from campus, is not little. It buzzes with 35 full-time staff members — Wharton’s online efforts, by comparison, employ one-half of one staffer, Mr. Ulrich said — who are scrambling to complete a proprietary platform that, after this summer’s limited go-round, could support much larger enrollments.

“Here’s Hollywood,” Ms. Kierstead said on a recent tour, passing an array of video equipment that’s hauled around to film business case-study protagonists on location. Nearby, two digital animators worked on graphics for Professor Christensen’s forthcoming course. Another staff member handled financial aid.

To run HBX with Ms. Kierstead, Mr. Nohria tapped Bharat Anand, 48, a strategy professor who had been researching how traditional media companies have coped, or haven’t, with digital disruption. “I think about those cases a lot,” said Professor Anand, who is also Mr. Nohria’s brother-in-law.

The dean handed him a sheet of six guiding principles, including these: HBX should be economically self-sustaining. It should not substitute for the M.B.A. program. It should seek to replicate the Harvard Business School discussion-based style of learning. This was no easy assignment, Professor Anand conceded.

“What is competitive advantage?” he asked, invoking Professor Porter’s signature theory. “It comes from being fundamentally different. We teach this all the time. But saying it is one thing. Putting it into practice is hard. When everyone is going free, everyone is going with a similar type of platform, it takes courage to do your own thing.”

On campus, Harvard business students face one another in five horseshoe-shaped tiers with oversized name cards. They fight for “airtime” while the professor orchestrates discussion from a central “pit.”

“We don’t do lectures,” Mr. Nohria said. “Part of what had already convinced me that MOOCs are not for us is that for a hundred years our education has been social.”

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The challenge was to invent a digital architecture that simulated the Harvard Business School classroom dynamic without looking like a classroom. In a demonstration of a course called economics for managers, the first thing the student sees is the name, background and location — represented by glowing dots on a map — of other students in the course.

A video clip begins. It’s Jim Holzman, chief executive of the ticket reseller Ace Ticket, estimating the supply of tickets for a New England Patriots playoff game: “Where I have a really hard time is trying to figure out what the demand is. We just don’t know how many people are on the sidelines saying, ‘Hey, I’m thinking about going.’ ”

It’s a complex situation meant to get students thinking about a key concept — “the distinction between willingness to pay and price,” Professor Anand said. “Just because something costs zero doesn’t mean people aren’t willing to pay something.” A second case study, on the pay model of The New York Times, drives the point home.

Then a box pops up on the screen with the words “Cold Call.” The student has 30 seconds to a few minutes to type a response to a question and is then prodded to assess comments made by other students. Eventually there is a multiple-choice quiz to gauge mastery of the concept. (This was surprisingly time-consuming to develop, Professor Anand said, because the business school does not give multiple-choice tests.)

At a faculty meeting in April, Professor Anand demonstrated the other two elements of HBX: continuing education for executives and a live forum. He unveiled the existence of a studio, built in collaboration with Boston’s public television station, that allows a professor to stand in a pit before a horseshoe of 60 digital “tiles,” or high-definition screens with the live images and voices of geographically dispersed participants. “I’m proud of our team, and how carefully they’ve thought about it even before they’ve done it,” Professor Porter said.

The Clashing Models

Not everyone was so impressed. Professor Christensen, for one, worried that Harvard was falling into the very trap he had laid out in “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” “I think that we’ve way overshot the needs of customers,” he said. “I worry that we’re a little too technologically ambitious.”

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The dean, Nitin Nohria, found that students were also divided on the issue of online instruction.CreditRick Friedman for The New York Times

He also feared that HBX was tied too closely to the business school.

“There have been a few companies that have survived disruption, but in every case they set up an independent business unit that let people learn how to play ball in the new game,” he said. IBM survived the transition from mainframe computers to minicomputers, and then from minicomputers to personal computers, by setting up autonomous teams in Minnesota and then in Florida. “We haven’t got the separation required.”

Professor Porter has expressed the opposite view. Companies that set up stand-alone Internet units, he wrote in 2001, “fail to integrate the Internet into their proven strategies and thus never harness their most important advantages.” Barnes & Noble’s decision to set up a separate online unit is one of his cautionary tales. “It deterred the online store from capitalizing on the many advantages provided by the network of physical stores,” he said, “thus playing into the hands of Amazon.”

Here is where the two professors’ differences come to a head. In the Porter model, all of a company’s activities should be mutually reinforcing. By integrating everything into one, cohesive fortification, “any competitor wishing to imitate a strategy must replicate a whole system,” Professor Porter wrote.

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In the Christensen model, these very fortifications become a liability. In the steel industry, which was blindsided by new technology in smaller and cheaper minimills, heavily integrated companies couldn’t move quickly and ended up entombed inside their elaborately constructed defenses.

“If Clay and I differ, it’s that Clay sees disruption everywhere, in every business, whereas I see it as something that happens every once in a while,” Professor Porter said. “And what looks like disruption is in fact an incumbent firm not embracing innovation” at all.

In other words, it’s not that U.S. Steel was destined to be undone by minimills. It’s that its managers let it happen.

“The disrupter doesn’t always win,” argued Professor Porter, who nonetheless called Professor Christensen “phenomenal” and “one of the great management thinkers.”

Who will win the coming business school shakeout? Professor Porter acknowledged that it’s a multidimensional question.

Most schools offering MOOCs do so through outside distribution channels like Coursera, a for-profit company that has Duke, Wharton, Yale, the University of Michigan and several dozen other schools in its stable. EdX, of which Harvard was a co-founder with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, counts Dartmouth and Georgetown among its charter members.

“These will come to have considerable power,” predicted Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He pointed to the aircraft industry: “In order to get into China, Boeing transferred its technology to parts manufacturers there. Pretty soon there’s going to be Chinese firms building airplanes. Boeing created their own competition.” Business schools, he said, “are doing it again; we are creating our own demise.”

Professors as Online Stars

The worry is all the more acute at midtier schools, which fear that elite business schools will move to gobble up a larger share of a shrinking pie.

“Would you rather watch Kenneth Branagh do ‘Henry V,’ or see it at a community theater?” asked Mr. Ulrich at Wharton. “There are going to be some instructors who become more valuable in this new world because they master the new medium. We’d rather be those guys than the people left behind.”

This raises a still more radical case, in which the winners are not any institution, new or old, but a handful of star professors. One of Professor Porter’s generic observations — that the Internet increases the “bargaining power of suppliers” — suggests just that. “It’s potentially very divisive in a way,” he acknowledged. “We’re all partners; we all get paid roughly the same. Anything that starts to fracture the enterprise is a sobering prospect.”

François Ortalo-Magné, dean of the University of Wisconsin’s business school, says fissures have already appeared. Recently, a rival school offered one of his faculty members not just a job, but also shares in an online learning start-up created especially for him. “We’re talking about millions of dollars,” Mr. Ortalo-Magné said. “My best teachers are going to find platforms so they can teach to the world for free. The market is finding a way to unbundle us. My job is to hold this platform together.”

To that end, he has changed his school’s incentive structure, which, as in most of academia, was based primarily on the number of research articles published in elite journals. Now professors who can’t crack those journals but “have a gift for inspiring learning,” he said, in person or online, are being paid as top performers, too. “We are now rewarding people who have tenure to give up on research,” Mr. Ortalo-Magné said.

Mr. Ortalo-Magné spins out the possibilities of disruption even further. “How many calculus professors do we need in the world?” he asked. “Maybe it’s nine. My colleague says it’s four. One to teach in English, one in French, one in Chinese, and one in the farm system in case one dies.”

What is to stop a Coursera from poaching Harvard Business School faculty members directly? “Nothing,” Mr. Nohria said. “The decision people will have to make is whether being on the platform of Harvard Business School, or any great university, is more important than the opportunity to build a brand elsewhere.

“Does Clay Christensen become Clay Christensen just by himself? Or does Clay Christensen become Clay Christensen because he was at Harvard Business School? He’ll have to make that determination.”

Teachers are earning millions of dollars selling their lesson plans on the “iTunes of education”

Real evidence of the “iTunes of education” already up and running

BY ERIN GRIFFITH
ON NOVEMBER 4, 2013

TeacherspayTeachers has never raised a cent of outside venture capital. That’s fine — the 28-person company, launched from a New York apartment in 2006, has been profitably helping teachers sell their lesson plans to each other for some time now. This week, the company crossed the threshold of $60 million in teacher-to-teacher sales. That’s up from just $5 million a year ago. It’s just another positive milestone on the company’s quest to become the iTunes for digitally delivered educational content, according to founder Paul Edelman.

If, in this metaphor, textbook companies are the record labels and teachers are indie artists, it’s the teachers, not the labels, that are earning handsomely with this new platform.

One teacher, Deanna Jump, has sold $2 million worth of lesson plans. The sales have allowed her to buy a mansion in Florida and made her a celebrity in the teaching community — she’s taking a year-long sabbatical to speak at education conferences.

Jump’s resources became popular because they’re creative and well-designed, Edelman says. The secret sauce of TeacherspayTeachers’ platform is that it allows teachers to promote themselves within the community. Jump has more than 33,000 followers on the site, so each time she posts a new lesson plan or materials, her fans are alerted.

“Because she’s a real teacher, her resources are far more engaging and effective than what publishers put out there,” Edelman says.

I’d argue that TeacherspayTeachers is less like iTunes and more of a marketplace, like eBay, or a sharing economy startup, like Airbnb. Either way, Edelman’s bet that teachers are their own best resource was spot on: TeacherspayTeachers has accumulated 2.6 million registered users by word of mouth, half of which joined in the last year.

Of that group, 40,000 are active sellers on the platform and more than 800,000 have bought a lesson plan. Around 15 percent of the site’s content is free, but the average item on the site costs $4.44. After Jump, the next four-highest earning teachers have heard more than half a million dollars; 64 teachers have earned six figures and 384 have earned more than $20,000.

During the Fall, TeacherspayTeachers has been processing more than a million in sales every week.

But it’s about more than the money, Edelman assures me. Even teachers that only sell a few lesson plans get some gratification from sharing their work. “It feels great to know that other teachers and students around the country and world are benefiting from their teaching ideas,” he says.

The company takes a 30 percent cut of sales for free users. Once a teacher’s lesson plan becomes popular, Edelman says they often upgrade to a premium account, which costs $59.95 a year and gives teachers 85 percent of their sales. That nets TeacherspayTeachers’ cut out to an average of 198 to 19 percent.

TeacherspayTeachers’ sales are almost entirely in the US. That’s it’s next growth opportunity. Edelman is based in France and his tech teams are based in India and the Ukraine. His next mission will be to expand TeacherspayTeachers’ user base, too.