Winter Meeting, Washington, DC
28 February 2000
Renewing Universities for the New Economy
Address by
Sir John Daniel
President, The United States Open University
Vice-Chancellor, The Open University
Introduction
Governors, Fellow Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Thank you, Governor Leavitt, for inviting me to address this historic meeting. Ever since Governor Leavitt and I explored the synergies between the Western Governors University and the Open University I’ve had a profound admiration for his commitment to the renewal of higher education.
Postsecondary education is now high on your agendas for strengthening your states. I expect that, although you are justly proud of your state’s university system, you believe that new realities call for new approaches. Your universities are challenged by the electronically-enhanced global economy described so compellingly by yesterday’s speakers.
My title is Renewing Universities for the New Economy. Renewing - because starting over is not an option. America already has the world’s most extensive higher education system. The creation of some new institutions, such as the Western Governors University and the United States Open University, can help to promote change in the wider system – but your overriding aim must be to target the intellectual firepower of the existing public, private and for-profit institutions at the needs of the future.
I hope to illuminate your task through the experience of the Open University in the UK and the US. Given that Anglo-American spin I shall leave you with two quotes from the great Anglo-American statesman, Winston Churchill, who once said: “Sometimes doing your best is not enough. Sometimes you must do what is required.”
So what does the new economy require?
In my first encounter with the old US economy I helped to debase the coinage. That was in 1965 when, with a freshly minted degree in Metallurgy from Oxford University in one hand and a brand new Green Card in the other, I arrived in New Haven, Connecticut to help develop an alloy to replace silver in dimes and quarters. Those silver coins would soon have been worth more than their face value if melted down – which could have been the sixties equivalent of a good dot.com stock today.
We had to find an alloy that looked like silver, behaved like silver in vending machines, but cost less than silver. You have, in your pockets and purses, coins of the sandwich alloy we developed and I am proud that I helped to make the sandwich stick together.
There are three parallels between renewing our universities for the new economy and changing our coinage thirty years ago.
First, we must reduce the costs of higher education. Second, we need graduates who can make the vending machine of the new economy work. Third, just as we had to weld three strips of metal together to get coins that looked and behaved like silver, renewing universities for the new economy combines several objectives.
Challenges of the New Economy
Two realities define the new agenda for postsecondary education: lifelong learning and technology.
Lifelong Learning
We talk about the era of lifelong learning. The term rolls easily from the lips of educators - but it doesn’t appeal much to ordinary people. It sounds to many like a life sentence in an institution they disliked, namely school. What does that tell us?
If people are to want to learn regularly throughout life they need more from their initial education. The K-12 system must make kids enjoy learning and give them the solid foundation that creates the society of e-inclusion that Carly Fiorina spoke about yesterday. Then their first experience of college must give them a degree of flexibility - not the illusion of a degree for life.
Last week my wife and I became curious about the term sophomore so we looked it up. Webster defined the word sophomoric as ‘conceited and overconfident of knowledge but poorly informed and immature’. That’s a good definition of what we don’t want in the new economy! We need people who can ask good questions, not people full of answers. We need fast learners. So lifelong learning means strengthening initial education.
The second implication of lifelong learning is that higher education must become more accessible, diverse and flexible. Lifelong learning means helping people learn what they want, when they want and where they want. Today large numbers of adults, with work and family responsibilities, need to move on from their community college degree - or maybe finish the Masters they never completed. For many such people going to class is not an option – and they are a much bigger group than the 18-22 year-olds. Lifelong learning also means helping such people become independent learners. Just think of the impact on the economy if we all became even ten percent more effective at acquiring new knowledge quickly by ourselves.
Third, lifelong learning means a new concept of quality. People want the assurance that what they learn will be up to date and will give them competencies that employers value. In short, citizens are interested in the output of higher education for themselves. But most universities are still focused on inputs. An undergraduate program is good if the entering freshmen have good high school grades; a quality graduate program is one that recruits people with high grade point averages. In an era of lifelong learning that misses the point. The only valid measures of quality are the outputs of the programs.
Fourth, because lifelong learning means more education and training, it must also mean cutting the costs of education. There are two reasons. First, by improving productivity, IT is cutting the costs of almost everything. That’s why the new economy is giving us growth without inflation. Universities must join the trend to higher productivity and lower costs. Second, as you know well, e-commerce threatens sales-tax revenues. There are challenges ahead for government expenditures. If citizens bear more of the costs of education and training themselves, then their governments should at least help them get value for money. The quality assurance role of the states in a busy postsecondary education market with many new providers is a speech in itself.
So much for lifelong learning. I summarize its implications in terms of the eternal – and eternally challenging - triangle of access, quality and cost. As governors you often have to balance the tensions in that triangle when you make public policy. Yesterday Tom Friedman called it your golden straitjacket.
What we want, of course, is wider access, better quality and lower costs. That sounds impossible – but I bring you the good news that it is deliverable.
Technology
It is deliverable through technology, which is the second key feature of the new economy. Technology - information technology in particular - is central. IT is the productivity motor that drives the new economy forward. IT is changing the spatial organization of society: where and how we live. The rapid development of IT continually challenges all citizens to change – but it also provides tools to help us adapt.
The Open University
The tools of technology can be used on a large scale to renew higher education and to change the shape of the eternal triangle of access, cost and quality. I give you the example of the Open University.
The Open University was a political creation. Most significant innovations in higher education have been driven by politicians – whatever academics say. Here three politicians had four objectives. Prime Minister Harold Wilson wanted to increase access to higher education for working adults, and to use new technology for learning and teaching. Jennie Lee, the Minister who got the show on the road, wanted to prove that a technology-based university could be as good as the best. Margaret Thatcher - she of the golden straitjacket - wanted to reduce the costs of higher education.
The launch of the Open University coincided with the first moon landing in 1969. Everything seemed possible and the new university was given an ambitious mission: to be open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods and open as to ideas.
Fast forward thirty years to the launch of the United States Open University, which added two further goals for today’s web-enhanced global economy: to be open as to time and open to the world.
What has the Open University achieved and how? I’ll tell the story in terms of the triangle of access, quality and cost.
Access
This year the OU has 170,000 students in degree credit courses, including 1,400 Ph.D. students and a graduate school of 40,000. There are another 60,000 or so in continuing education and professional development programs including 35,000 teachers learning to use IT in the classroom.
Who are all these people? They are mostly working adults, they span the age range from teens to nineties and they have a broader socio-economic profile than most universities. We’ve just admitted 50,000 new students and nearly 15,000 of them are on fee waivers or financial assistance.
Where are they? Most are in the UK but there are 30,000 students in the rest of the world. Openness to places – globalization - is very real for us.
Quality
Now, what about quality? Britain has a fierce state-run quality assessment system for universities that alarms visiting American academics - who worry lest it come soon to a theatre near them. There may be some overkill - because British bureaucrats believe that nothing succeeds like excess. However, the system does allow direct quality comparisons between campus universities and the Open University. What do they show?
In research the OU ranks in the top third of UK universities and some of its research is world leading. One research team is sending a lander to Mars to find out whether there is life there. They keep asking me for more money so I have my fingers crossed that their lander, Beagle II, doesn’t disappear into a deep hole like the last US Mars mission.
In teaching the Open University ranks in the top 10%. This is a list of the elite UK universities where most programs are rated as excellent. The OU is well up the list. Last year all OU programs assessed received excellent ratings, including subjects that require lab work.
I was particularly proud of the result for General Engineering where the Open University was the only English university to score full marks. Oxford and Cambridge, who also have pretty good schools, got lower marks!
So here is a University with high quality output but few restrictions on access. To have broken that historic – and insidious - link between quality and exclusivity in higher education is the Open University’s proudest achievement. And it is a transferable technology.
Cost
What about cost?
The big open universities around the world, which I call the mega-universities, have per student costs that are much lower than the campus universities in the same country. For the UK, government figures show that the total cost of a Bachelor’s degree, counting expenditure from all sources, is about 50% less than the average cost on campus. These low costs are possible partly because most of the money goes directly into teaching and learning. The Open University has saved the UK government the capital cost of building about ten campuses.
Why is the Open University successful?
How has the Open University managed to reconfigure the eternal triangle? It does so by being a learning system with four key elements.
First, high quality multi-media learning materials.
Second, each student gets strong personal support. An associate faculty member is assigned to every twenty students and feels personally responsible for the progress of each. I enrolled as a student myself last year and I felt very well supported.
Third, this huge learning system relies on good logistics and administration. As we all found during America’s first e-Christmas last December, successful e-services depend on getting the ‘services’ right as well as getting the ‘e’ right.
Fourth, we are convinced that having OU faculty active in research helps to create the intellectual buzz that students find so attractive.
By being a learning system the Open University has done more to institutionalize innovation than any university I know. It was created in the television age but today, with 90,000 students online from home, it is leading the academy into the age of e-learning. In the short time since I began speaking OU students have exchanged around 4,000 messages on the net.
There is also a stimulating traffic of ideas between the UK Open University and the US Open University whose first students began their studies this month. The USOU is benefiting from courseware and ideas that work well in the rest of the world. The UKOU is getting ideas for its own future from watching the USOU launch into the America of the 21st century.
So let me close with an example of Anglo-American synergy related to one of your key challenges, namely the improvement of the K-12 system.
The Open University is a learning system created by the teamwork of thousands of staff. This is not the same as Clark Kerr’s definition of a university as a ‘collection of academic entrepreneurs united by a common grievance over parking’.
Because the OU learning system delivers quality at scale, the UK government often asks for its help with national goals, notably in the K-12 school system.
Two recent examples are, first, the initial training of teachers in shortage areas and, second, giving practicing teachers the skills to use IT in their classrooms.
In the first example the UK government discovered that there are significant numbers of good people, with degrees in shortage subjects like mathematics and science, who are doing other jobs in the workforce but who would like to make a career switch into K-12 teaching if they could train for it part-time. The Open University developed a part-time program and it’s been a great success. This year it produced 5% of all the UK’s new math and science secondary teachers and it has also created fruitful partnerships with the schools, often in the cities, where the trainees do their practice teaching.
This program has been adopted by Dr Charlie Reed, Chancellor of the California State University, as the model for the CalStateTeach program that is now allowing hundreds of California teachers with emergency permits to gain their full credentials. If California shares the UK experience these people will make excellent teachers and stay in the profession.
In these K-12 programs scale is crucial: large numbers and high quality go together. That is also true in our Learning Schools Program. This is a government-supported partnership between the Open University and a major computer vendor to train working teachers, in their schools, to use computers effectively in the classroom. We launched in November and already there are 35,000 teachers in the program. Feedback is excellent.
I know that both these areas of teacher training are of concern to many of you we’d be pleased to share the know-how if you want to set up similar programs. The US Open University - which shares the strong Open University philosophy of service to public policy even though it receives no public funds - is ready to help with your state’s teacher education agenda through a public-private partnership. Dr Richard Jarvis, Chancellor of the US Open University, who was formerly Chancellor of the University and Community College system of Nevada, is here with us today. He can also tell you about a distance learning course on the art of political campaign management that we are offering with the American University of Washington, DC. It may be just what is needed to help some people get elected in what promises to be an interesting campaign year!
I said that I would quote Winston Churchill twice. What he also said was: “America will always do the right thing – after having exhausted all other possibilities”. So I hope that my remarks - and the experience of the Open University - can help your states do the right thing to renew your universities for the new economy. It has been a privilege to address you.