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Our Guest today is uh Pat Harker president of the University of Delaware and we're going to speak to him about
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the challenges facing uh higher education Pat thank you so much for joining us today at knowledge at Wharton
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well M it's great to be here so uh you've written this really thought-provoking paper and I wonder if
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we could start by looking at the costs of higher education and and why they seem to be soaring uh as University
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education a good investment today yes it's still a good investment but a lot
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of people are now questioning it right after the recession that we've gone through and people are coming out with
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$100,000 in debt they may not have the job a job at all or it's they're underemployed and so there's a lot of
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questioning the the evidence still says it's it's worth it but you can understand why people are questioning
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this today so what are some of the aren factors that are driving costs up and the uh uh and what have universities
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done to try and curb them well there's a lot of factors but if you look at the
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main factor it's low labor productivity as defined by an economist I have to be
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careful when I say this to a faculty member they say hey I'm productive what
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do you mean so I have to say is defined by an economist and this goes back to will Bal Mall's idea he published in
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1967 Bal Mall's cost disease economies have sectors that have low labor productivity High labor productivity on
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average in inflation is a mix of those but the ones who have low labor productivity will always have inflation
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higher than the average right so so when we talk about productivity in in most Industries uh Information Technology
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often factors into the picture uh do you have a sense of what the impact of uh Innovation uh information technology has
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been on education sure but let me step back and not talk about education but think about Healthcare so we in higher
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education are not like healthcare and that we've consumed a lot of technology
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to improve quality but not really with an eye to reducing cost until recently right I mean once uh infl the healthcare
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reaches 25% of GDP people are start to say whoa let's let's think about this
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and we need to reduce costs we've done the same thing in higher education we
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put in new projectors new technology but we've really not fundamentally changed
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the way we educate and that I think is the key that technology alone is not going to solve the productivity problem
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technology enables new processes and those new processes will then deliver lower cost higher quality what might be
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some examples of that of lower cost higher quality I think what we're starting to see emerge are things like
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mukes so mukes can play a part of the role there we're starting to see a lot
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more problem-based learning Interactive Learning where students are learning by doing not by by being lectured to the
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old days and you think about forget Information Technology the way we tried to improve productivity in the past was
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to build 300 person lecture Halls right that does improve labor productivity whether it improves learning is really
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the question I raised in the paper that we've developed very efficient teaching
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machines and that's that's okay if teaching equals learning but it doesn't
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and it increasingly doesn't in this generation that is technology enabled and that's what we need to try to break
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and there are examples lots of examples of people experimenting with new learning modalities not necessarily new
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teaching modalities and I think there is a difference and it's a fundamental
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difference right uh and and then come back in a minute to uh you know the difference between teaching and learning
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but I'd go back like to go back to your paper for a minute uh where where you
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write there is both hope and fear that it Innovations will end the university as we know it and why why is that sure
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so so clay Christensen with disruptive innovation has been talking a lot about this in the case of higher education
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that the incumbent institutions us uh we think everything's fine and for those
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who are heavily owed it probably is for a while but for those who are not there are a lot of forces that are changing
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the market first the demographic decline in the United States so the college age
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cohort that we traditionally service is in Decline we're also seeing more first
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generation lower income students coming into high education so we can't charge
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what we used to charge and we also are now seeing in addition to all those forces we're starting to see the world
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wake up to higher education building new campuses in China building new campuses
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in India and so the flow to the US is starting to change as well so all that's
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gotten universities to start to think about well GE how do we become more productive right and and and one of the
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things you suggest in the paper is to shift the emphasis from teaching uh to learning right and and I wonder if we
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can talk about how the design of of the educational institutions can be changed so that the emphasis is more on the
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learner than on the teacher so let me give you a very specific example we opened up a new science building last
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summer and it's all based all the classrooms are based around the concept of problem-based learning the classrooms
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are 48 seat classrooms with two 24 seat Labs on either side students walk in for
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2hour sessions they're learning some mix of biology and chemistry they don't know
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if it's biology they don't know if it's chemistry what they know is their
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problems are trying to solve that are related to biology and chemistry they work out the hypothesis immediately get
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out of their seats go into the laboratory and start to test solutions to the problems that were presented in
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the class and then come back very interactive very different than say the chemistry you and I took in college
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where we took a 300 person lecture and then later in the week we took a lab and the lab sometimes made no sense with
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respect to the lecture and we were supposed to figure it out problem-based learning changes all that that was an
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efficient way to teach right have the 300 person lecture and the laboratory separate this is really learner Centric
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really saying what's the most efficient way for students to learn that science
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and make it sticky right that not only do they learn it but they're not cramming it it stays with them because
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they discovered it themselves right and and and so do you think universities will be able to use these kinds of
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techniques so that they're no longer teaching factories as you call them yes
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I think what the only way to do that though is to take the material that is commod can be commodified right in other
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words it can be packaged up simple stuff basic calculus basic concepts and use other tools whether it's a moo or
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frankly you can go to Old School Technology a traditional textbook and do Competency Based testing on those things
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things students learning on their own and using class time in a much more active manner than we do today right so
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as we think about uh these changes that are required in education are there any lessons to be learned from other service
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Industries oh sure sure I mean one is there's always the great hope that technolog is going to save us all right
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it's not true again go go back to robotic surgery lots of evidence has come out in the last uh few years that
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in except for very few cases the robotic surgery for many different disease types
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is no more efficient than the traditional laparoscopic surgery with a surgeon's hands but try to be a hospital
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today without the robot so sometimes we just consume technology with no real benefit so we need to learn that we also
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need to learn that again it comes back to changing processes the way we do things I mean it's standard when new
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technology comes in that we try to lay technology on Old processes think of banking me used to be great fights in
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the banking industry which I studied extensively when I was here at Wharton that the the ATMs and the internet
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banking was going to destroy the bank because everything was about the branch and everybody's Focus was well it'll
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destroy the branch we can't let that happen well think about the analog in higher education all these new
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technologies are going to destroy the traditional classroom no it's just going
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to change what you do in that classroom just like internet banking and ATMs changed what you did in the in the
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branch one of the concepts that you explain in your paper is the customer efficiency right uh I wonder if we could
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explain what exactly that is and how it will change education sure so if you think about Services unlike
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manufacturing when you bought your Toyota or your Honda you didn't screw the bolts on the car right you bought
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the car you drive it the difference with a service any kind of service professional service healthare education
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is that the consumer is part of the production process right they're in there making it with you right if the
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consumer doesn't take their health seriously there's nothing a doctor can
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do if a student doesn't take their education seriously there's really nothing a professor can do so it's
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really focused on not making the system efficient from our perspective the provider but making the system efficient
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from the customer or students perspective so that they can be very effective in providing their own
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education because ultimately they have to educate themselves we just don't pour
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knowledge into their heads if if technology is just a tool why have so many educational institutions almost
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made it the Beall and end all of innovation and education yeah but again if you you think outside of Education
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lots of Industries have gone through this transformation right where technolog is going to revolutionize
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everything they realize it flopped then they get around to really rethinking the processes we got a lot of
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Legacy Concepts running around in our head about what works and what doesn't
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and so I don't think we're any different than any other industry particularly any
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other service industry we're in the process of this transformation some of that transformation frankly is being
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fueled by forces outside of higher education another Major Force or outside of traditional higher education is the
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fact that the Venture Capital flow into the higher education space is increasing
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in rapidly because they see an opportunity here remember it's not just the us around the world the middle class
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is emerging the first thing the middle class around the world wants is educate their children and the traditional
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campuses we can't build them fast enough or big enough to to educate in the traditional way and they see that
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opportunity and we as the traditional higher education institutions also need to think about that opportunity because
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part of our mission is to serve that global glal market so what role does the design of the curriculum play in this
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transformation and and and uh to to go one step further traditionally it's educational institutions that have
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defined what the curriculum should be in a learner Centric environment what role
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should the learner play in designing the curriculum that's a very good question
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so start with my my old colleague Bob zamsky who here at The Graduate School of Education at Penn now in his recent
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book checklist for change he says it's all about the curriculum it is so you
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think about the curriculum it's really the design it's really it really constrains what you can do so imagine
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the following scenario you're working at say o apple and your boss comes in and
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you're part of a product development team and they say we need the next big thing well what's the price point for it
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we don't know that would never happen they'd have to know at least what kind of costs
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we're talking about for the product that that they want to deliver think about
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how the curricula are developed in universities faculty committees come up with ideas they toss them over to the
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administration and they say make it so and without any concept of what that's
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going to cost that's all that also has to change what do you mean by ideation uh large frame pattern
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recognition and complex communication yeah so in a recent book from colleagues at MIT the second Machine age they talk
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about the fact that the machines keep coming right and Lites um notwithstanding we're not going to stop
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it anytime soon so they asked the question what do human beings do today and in the foreseeable future better
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than Computing technology and they come up with three things ideation truly new creative
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thinking not just combining ideas which a machine can do take a little of this a
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little of that come up with a new but truly new ideas if you were out of the box ideas right the second is large
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frame or large scale pattern recognition so machines can do a lot of pattern recognition but putting together
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technical social political economic cultural factors and to try to come up with a solution to an issue that's hard
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that's what we we human beings do and the third is complex communication machines are getting better and better
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communicating but still I'd still put for high-end sales a human being in front of another human being to sell
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because they read the nuances the non-verbal Communications it's those things that are very important for
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students to learn and you have to ask yourself then what percentage of our curricula are devoted to those probably
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not much and we then have to think about that in redesigning the curriculum for the
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future well there there's uh one other part of your paper that I found really
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fascinating which is uh uh deals with whether education institutions should encourage students to
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dream uh how and uh why and how uh should that happen so if faculty time is being used
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in a teaching Factory I'll call it where we're just crunching classes through and
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no times being used to help students faculty mentoring helping guiding students then The Faculty really can't
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help that student dream because they're so focused on the production engine of
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just teaching the classes and this changes people's lives I would not be doing what I do today if it wasn't for a
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faculty member John leapor who passed away recently in civil engineering at this University who took me under his
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wing in my junior year and gave me a chance to do research I never even knew that was a an
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opportunity that was available to me he opened up my world he helped me to dream
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in a very different way that's what I I talk about in this paper is freeing up
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the time to do the basic get the basics can be done in other ways enabled by technology and really changing the model
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so that faculty are spending more of their time on that kind of coaching the mentoring the dreaming with the students
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right know uh as as this education space goes through all these changes you referred earlier to the you know entry
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of uh more and more Venture Capital into this place uh there are some very interesting startups that are trying to
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deal with the same issues that uh you know the big established institutions are trying to Grapple with and one of
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them is minurva right I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about minurva what its model is what its
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successes and failures might have been so far and what lessons that might have for other schools to learn from so
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manura is a startup it's started by a fellow Ben Nelson who's A Wharton undergrad Alum uh I full disclosure I'm
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on his Advisory Board along with several others including uh Larry Summers and Lee Schulman and Bob kery the former
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Senator but it's really Ben that's been driving this and he has Steve klin the
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former dean of social sciences at Harvard who's now joined him and Steve being a cognitive scientist has really
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developed a learning platform based on the what we know about cognition about learning we don't learn by sitting in a
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classroom half asleep we learn by active engagement Active Learning so the whole
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model is based around that there are physical campuses where students will live but their classroom will be their
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laptop with 18 other students where they can't take a break for 45 minutes they're engaged for 45 minutes in a very
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deep way so they're bringing in their pilot class to San Francisco this year
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to shake out the the software uh they have four classes they're teaching manura has part Competency Based so they
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have students will need to graduate with competency in two languages other than and their native tongue University won't
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teach that they're Rosetta Stone there are other tools out there to do that they're going to spend their time on
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those issues we talked about earlier ideation large frame pattern recognition and communication four classes formal
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reasoning empirical reasoning uh complex system so how all those factors intersect and multimodal
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communication critical reading critical writing notice it's a heavy dose of the
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liberal arts but not packaged in the way we typically do the liberal arts but it's helping students to really think
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critically what impact do you think these kinds of models will have on the will they truly succeed in disrupting
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the existing educational establishment they could um you know not only disrupt maybe not the traditional educational
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establishment as much as take up the growth that's going to be happening around the world right because
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if this model is more successful we can't build a lot of pen depends it's
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very expensive to build a university like this the manura model is scalable and scalable to serve that growing need
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around the world uh should universities consider Outsourcing services to one another and what
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implications might that have yeah that's a good question so we've been Outsourcing for a long time right
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textbook manufacturers still package up PowerPoint slides with their textbook they give instructors manuals with
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problems they a lot of Faculty around the world that just take the PowerPoint slides and the instructor's manuals and
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deliver the course auk is just a modern version of that but there's various forms of
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Outsourcing so you could do that or you could actually Outsource to a third party like for example manerva is doing
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to teach language the basics of language to a Rosetta Stone or like companies there's another form of Outsourcing
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though that I really worry about one of our missions particular as research universities is not only to generate
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knowledge but to sustain it to protect it to pass it on to Future Generations well some fields are
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cyclical right when I was a student here at this University in the 80s lot in 70s
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a lot of interest in Russian right not so much in the 90s and 2000s now it's
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actually coming back and so we need to maintain that capability but it's hard
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to do if you're a university administrator and you've got three to four students in a class studying
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Russian but why don't you use technology in a simple way to create virtual classrooms and consortia of universities
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so gather say in this case all the other ivys to teach low R so instead of having
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three four people we have three times eight in the classroom and now we can afford to keep that alive I think that
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form of Outsourcing has not really been done much there are places where it's
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been done and it's been done very successfully so clearly as as we've discussed there's a a huge amount of
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change that is required in higher education who do you think are going to be the primary change agents who will
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drive this change well the faculty have to believe in the change but don't they
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have the most to lose that's a good question they might or they also have the most to gain right
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it depends on right it depends on how you look at it so I know for example several faculty who have gotten deeply
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immersed in muks the massive open online courses and I asked one of them once uh
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who was visiting our campus I said why are you doing he's a friend of mine they
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said this is the future and I want to get ready for the future so not all faculty are going to do it but that like
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anything they're going to be early adopters ones who see what the future looks like and they want to be part of
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it you don't need a lot you just need a few to create the Skunk Works experimental lab to to prove the
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concept and I have one final question if you look five or 10 years out what changes do you see on the horizon uh for
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higher education uh what kind of action plans do you see universities having to put in place and
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if you're optimistic or pessimistic uh what are the reasons for that I'll start with the optimism and
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pessimism on both it depends on where you stand so I mean if you are a small College uh that or a state university
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non-research State University we're already seeing Moody S&P is downgrading
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the debt of these institutions saying you're not going to survive so there's
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concern if I was sitting there I'd be very concerned uh that either I can can
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I change quickly enough to make it uh I think for universities that are currently strong and robust uh like like
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any industry the win or take all Society does tend to exist so for those if they
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do the right things if they seiz the opportunities that are in front of them if they seiz the opportunities to change
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which is a very hard thing to to do right we as human beings don't like change fundamentally uh then they will
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do very well otherwise they may join the others in Decline and that's what I
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worry about because in the end of the day the higher education system in this country is the gem or one of the gems of
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the United States of America and higher education is critical to Economic Development and growth all around the
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world we've got to get this right thanks so much Pat really appreciate you speaking to knowledge
00:22:27
word thanks M [Music] cool