Colleges resist innovation, said researchers at an American Enterprise Institute conference on Reinventing the University. Some said there’s “a dearth of shared ideas that a critical mass of institutions can rally around,” reports Jack Stripling on Inside Higher Ed.
The National Center for Academic Transformation, or NCAT, is the only group pushing colleges to use technology to transform courses, said Suzanne Walsh of Benchstrength.
“While NCAT is a fabulous, fabulous example, is it the only innovation we have in higher ed? Where else can we find pockets of innovation that can help us?” said Walsh, formerly of the Lumina Foundation for Education.
Community colleges should require at-risk students to use support services and engage in campus activities, even if some don’t have the time or motivation, said Charlene R. Nunley, former president of Montgomery Community College. “I would lean toward losing some of the students who can’t comply,” said Nunley, saying disengaged students will be lost anyhow.
Dominic Brewer, associate dean for research and faculty affairs at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education, and William G. Tierney, director of Southern California’s Center for Higher Education Policy and Analysis, introduced a paper attacking the American Council on Education (ACE) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), among other advocacy groups, for fighting innovation.
In a discussion of profit colleges, the fastest growing sector of higher education, Kaplan’s Andrew Rosen, for-profits have to deliver superior educational outcomes or lose students. “At the price [students are] paying, they better get value,” he said. Most nonprofits “have pretty much thrown in the towel on improving education,” he said.
Paul Osterman, professor of human resources and management at MIT, responded, “We know there are crappy schools out there that rip students off, and the market is not forcing them to be good.”
Mission creep” — trying to do too much – is preventing community colleges from improving student outcomes, argued Osterman.
“There is not a political movement around community colleges like there is in the K-12 reform community,” he said. “We know good practice, it’s really a political [and] administrative problem to improve these institutions, not a what-should-we-do problem.”
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