Higher Education Is Stuck in the Middle Ages -- Will Universities Adapt or Die Off in Our Digital World?

By Don Tapscott, Edge. Posted June 17, 2009.

For fifteen years, I've been arguing that the digital revolution will challenge many fundamental aspects of the University. I've not been alone. In 1998, none other than, Peter Drucker predicted that big universities would be "relics" within 30 years.

Flash forward to today and you'd be reasonable to think that we have been quite wrong. University attendance is at an all time high. The percentage of young people enrolling in degree granting institutions rose over 115% from 1969-1970 to 2005-2007, while the percentage of 25- to 29-year-old Americans with a college degree doubled. The competition to get into the greatest universities has never been fiercer. At first blush the university seems to be in greater demand than ever.

Yet there are troubling indicators that the picture is not so rosy. And I'm not just talking about the decimation of university endowments by the current financial meltdown.

Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning, as the web inexorably becomes the dominant infrastructure for knowledge serving both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people.

Meanwhile on campus, there is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University -- the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn.

The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It's a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril.

The model of pedagogy, of course, is only one target of criticism directed toward universities.

The Many Challenges to the University

Most resources of large universities are directed towards research, not learning. The universities are not primarily institutes of higher learning, but institutes for science and research. In his book Rethinking Science, Michael Gibbons developed a scathing critique of the current model science as conducted in the university.

Recently the questioning has heated up on other fronts. In the New York Times last month, Mark Taylor, chairman of Columbia University's religion department, whipped up a storm of academic controversy with a provocative OpEd page article called "The End of University as We Know It".

"Graduate education," he began, "is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans)." The key problem, he noted, began with Kant in his 1798 work, "The Conflict of the Faculties." Kant argued that universities should "handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee."

Taylor argued that graduate education must be restructured at a fundamental level to move away from the ultra-narrow scholarship. Among other things, he called for more cross-disciplinary inquiry, the creation of problem-focused programs, with a sunset clause, as well as more collaboration between all educational institutions, and the abolition of tenure. One week later, the outcry from fellow academics filled the entire letters page on the Sunday New York Times. One of his own colleagues at Columbia said it was "alarming and embarrassing" to hear "crass anti-intellectualism" emerge from his own institution. Another academic accused Taylor of "poisoning the waters of higher education."

The Model of Pedagogy

Whatever the merits of Taylor's call to restructure higher education, I think he is right to call for a deep debate on how universities function in a networked society. Yet I think he misses the most fundamental challenge to the university as we know it. The basic model of pedagogy is broken. "Broadcast learning" as I've called it is no longer appropriate for the digital age and for a new generation of students who represent the future of learning.

In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student you're an empty vassal and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."

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Don Tapscott is the author of 13 books on new technology in society, most recently Grown Up Digital. He recently completed a $4 million dollar investigation of the Net Generation. He is Chairman of the think tank in Genera Insight and an Adjunct Professor at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

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