Dave Hoffman (Temple) has an interesting post (Disrupting Law Schools) on the new report, Disrupting College How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education. As the photo on the cover suggests, the thrust of the report is that online education is a disruptive innovation that will force colleges to transform their business models:
The theory of disruptive innovation has significant explanatory power in thinking through the challenges and changes confronting higher education. Disruptive innovation is the process by which a sector that has previously served only a limited few because its products and services were complicated, expensive, and inaccessible, is transformed into one whose products and services are simple, affordable, and convenient and serves many no matter their wealth or expertise. The new innovation does so by redefining quality in a simple and often disparaged application at first and then gradually improves such that it takes more and more market share over time as it becomes able to tackle more complicated problems.
A disruptive innovation has a couple key elements or enablers that are particularly salient to the future of higher education. The first is a technology enabler. This allows the innovation, which starts in a simple application and competes first against nonconsumption—by serving people who were not able to be served or were not desirable to serve—to be “upwardly scalable” and improve year over year without replicating the cost structure of the old products and services it gradually replaces.
Online learning appears to be this technology enabler for higher education. It is for the first time disrupting higher education—and indeed helps explain much of the rapid growth in the up-start for-profit higher education sector over the last 10 years, even as many colleges and universities have struggled financially and had to cut back. Roughly 10 percent of students in 2003 took at least one online course. That fraction grew to 25 percent in 2008, was nearly 30 percent in the fall of 2009, and we project it will be 50 percent in 2014.1
The second element of a disruptive innovation is a business model innovation. Disruptive innovations are plugged into new models, which allow organizations to serve a job to be done in the lives of customers at this new lower price point or in this new, far more convenient fashion without extra cost. Plugging a disruptive innovation into an existing business model never results in transformation of the model; instead, the existing model co-opts the innovation to sustain how it operates. What this means is that, generally speaking, the disruption of higher education at public universities will likely need to be managed at the level of state systems of higher education, not at the level of the individual institutions, which will struggle to evolve. And if private universities are able to navigate this disruptive transition, they will have to do so by creating autonomous business units.
Dave notes that distance learning already is disrupting the LL.M. market — witness NYU’s recent announcement of an entirely online tax LL.M. — and predicts that the LL.M. will be totally disrupted within ten years. But what about the J.D. market?
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on last week’s Iowa Law Review Symposium on The Future of Legal Education:
Because his own law school wasn’t bound by decades of tradition, [UC-Irvine Dean Erwin] Chemerinsky said, he and the founding faculty members were able to do some things differently, like stressing hands-on, interdisciplinary study across all three years.
Asked by an audience member how the school could afford to do that, he answered, “It starts with having to charge ridiculous levels of tuition.” Annual tuition and fees at Irvine total just over $40,000 for California residents and $50,000 for out-of-state students.
Ann Althouse (Wisconsin) takes Dean Chemerinsky to task:
Nothing like using other people’s money to play out your expansive, innovative ideas. Except clinics and simulations are very old ideas. Cf. “high-speed” rail. …
You know what I would love in a new school — one that “wasn’t bound by decades of tradition”? A deliberate decision to embrace tradition. Let’s get a bunch of tough Socratic lawprofs in front of a classroom of students. And that’s it. Perfectly cost-effective. You can save money on admissions too by going old-school. Make it an old-fashioned GPA/LSAT meritocracy (and flunk them out if they don’t perform).
The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog asks ‘Would You Rather’ Goes to Law School; Which Would You Choose?:
If you had to do law school all over again, would you rather: a) go to a very pricey school that stresses “hands-on, interdisciplinary study” across all three years OR b) go to a school for half the price at which every class is run Kingsfield-style, with hundreds of kids in a lecture hall facing an imperious professor who uses only the Socratic method?
