The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out

Though the students are more diverse, the shape of classrooms, the style of instruction, and the subjects of study are all remarkably true to their century-old antecedents.

BYU-Idaho determined to serve only undergraduates, with the goal of providing even ordinary students a first-class education via a focused set of academic offerings.

clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education.7

At the same time, he argued, the desire to attract and satisfy students as though they are mere customers leads to academic coddling, in the form of easy grades and expensive facilities and entertainments, such as intercollegiate athletic teams.

The University of Phoenix, for example, recognized revenues of $2.5 billion in 2007; by the end of 2009 that figure had risen to nearly $3.8 billion.13 In that year it enrolled 355,800 new students, roughly 150,000 more than the total enrollment of the ten campuses of the University of California.14

To the contrary, success in an increasingly competitive higher education environment requires each institution to identify and pursue those things it can do uniquely well.

He introduced himself to faculty members as “a teacher who is now working as a president, not a president who used to be a teacher.”1

The other is the emergence of technologies that will, in the right hands, allow new competitors to serve this disenfranchised group of nonconsumers, as shown in Figure 1.2.

Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education.