The New American University

ASU might run like a business, but they seem to actually be running well.

ASU hasn’t made progress without its critics, namely the claim that it’s become a moneymaking credentialing machine, handing out degrees to anyone who pays and corporatizing The Great American University. And again, because I don’t have experience with university administration, I certainly wondered, while learning about ASU, how many of their clai... See more

Learning Enterprise is still new, so I wasn’t able to find much information about it, but one interesting program to highlight is the idea of “earned admissions”. Instead of charging thousands of dollars to enroll in ASU and take an online course, anyone can take classes for as little as $25 to start. Students only pay the $400 tuition if they want... See more

ASU’s retention efforts have been successful so far. Their four-year graduation rate increased more than 20 percentage points during this reform period and is well above the national average, which is especially remarkable considering that ASU, by increasing access, also accepted many more students who are at higher risk of not graduating.

ASU embraces a high acceptance rate, admitting 86 percent of applicants, compared to Harvard’s 5 percent. Far from “lowering their standards,” Crow and Dabars see this as a fulfillment of their mission to provide a quality, affordable education to more people. The high acceptance rate is a starting point for ASU, not a backwards reflection of their... See more

The Arizona State University charter state: ASU is a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom we exclude, but rather by whom we include and how they succeed; advancing research and discovery of public value; and assuming fundamental responsibility for the economic, social, cultural and overall health of the communities it serv... See more

Borrowing a restaurant metaphor from Harvard physician Atul Gawande, Crow and Dabars explain that most universities aspire towards offering a Michelin star experience to students, but what we actually need is a ‘fast casual’, Cheesecake Factory-like option that can provide an affordable, quality education to millions.

Crow and Dabars don’t hold back in tearing down what they call the “Harvardization” of universities, where schools are responding to the higher education crisis by decreasing their acceptance rates and increasing their price tags, instead of trying to develop a better product that’s designed for the scale and type of demand we’re seeing today.

Vocational schools are, by definition, focused on training people to a specific set of skills. They don’t necessarily offer everything that a college student would receive from an undergraduate education, especially one with a liberal arts focus, which (theoretically, anyway) prepares students with foundational skills like critical reasoning and pr... See more