Clay Christensen has predicted that half of universities will go bankrupt in the next 15 years. This is a bold statement to be sure. In A recent Business Insider interview he elaborated a bit on his thought process.
“I have made an observation that relates to this. It is as follows: Many of society’s most important and vexing problems were created by unnamed people in the past who decided unilaterally to combine things that should be separate and to separate things that should be together.“
“In the universities, we teach you what we decide you need to know. And the employers find out when they hire people that students didn’t learn what we needed them to learn. Online learning offerings, like the University of Phoenix, have relationships with employers and teach what you need to know. So things that we thought were important, like having a degree, get supplanted by achievements because a degree per se doesn’t mean as much.”
We have had some experience with this ourselves recently. The piece of paper does itself not grant knowledge. Experience is the true knowledge.
It seems that as consumers be are now looking at college as buying a brand. Or at least that is what the article was implying. The interviewer stated; “But doesn’t everybody who goes to Harvard Business School think, “I’ve now been anointed. My future is secure. I know the 200 or 300 other people who are going to be running the world in 40 years.” That in itself is so valuable it justifies the entire investment.” Where Christensen agreed.
I agree that there are many problems with academia today. I believe it starts out at the earliest stages of education and continues well into college and beyond. That and with escalating costs the value diminishes further. So maybe Christensen is correct, only time will tell.