This is an interesting book which I would recommend to all those concerned with the opportunities and challenges of contemporary higher education. At the same time, I would argue that its central thesis is undermined by its foci, its examples and its overlooking of key issues.
The thesis is that we have a number of elite institutions in America which are capable of riding out any storm (intellectual or financial) because of their reputation and their resources. While these institutions will be affected by the changes around them, the changes do not pose a mortal threat. Princeton will survive.
Other institutions will not be so lucky. The schools in the middle, i.e., the schools which 80% of American students attend, will need to either change and adapt or die. That is because there is so much `disruptive' (the new favorite word) change on the scene or on the horizon that the middling schools will be swept away by it.
There is some truth to this. For example, the regional public institutions which enroll a vast number of students have had their budgets cut for the last forty years, as have their flagship counterparts. The flagships, however, have other options. They have expanded research; they have expanded fundraising; they have created research incubators and tech transfer offices and they have increased patent income. As their nationally-prominent athletic teams have succeeded, they have increased licensing income and television revenue. The bottom line is that they have created new revenue streams and moved, to varying degrees, toward privatization. The regional publics, by and large, do not have these options, so what are they to do?
What they do, very often, is cut costs by deleting programs and increasing the number of contingent faculty. They pursue practices that reflect desperation, as do many of the middling private colleges across the country.
Professor DeMillo's advice is to be nimble and follow a series of suggestions: Forget about who is above you; focus on what differentiates you; establish your own brand; don't romanticize your weaknesses; be open; balance faculty-centrism and student-centrism, use technology, cut costs in half, focus on your own measures of success and adopt the New Wisconsin Idea (which involves the utilization of the university on behalf of the community).
These suggestions are interesting in and of themselves and worthy of our attention. The institutions he uses as examples, however, are not really `middling' ones. He returns again and again, for example, to Arizona State and Michael Crow's efforts to redefine the 21st century public institution there. This is not a good example. ASU is not a middling institution and it has seen an uncommon growth in enrollments which has enabled it to expand programming to encompass a vast new array of fields in a vast new set of configurations. Few regional publics, e.g., have ASU's options or its leadership.
On the other hand, what is the University of Northern Arizona doing? Cal State-Dominguez Hills? Ohio State University-Lima? Professor DeMillo tells a number of very interesting stories in the course of the book (e.g., the response of a Korean university to the challenges posed by a society that dominates ship-building in a world of narrow, deep water ports); the implication is that the stories indicate the kind of nimbleness on which our middling universities should be capitalizing. The bottom line, I am afraid, is that these kinds of actions and that kind of thinking will be instructive for top 200 institutions seeking comparative advantages. The actual middling institutions have already done away with many of their science and language departments and are not positioned to be nimble. Simple survival is their current goal.
Several other issues: Professor DeMillo is a computer scientist and his goals and strategies tend to be technocratic. He seeks, e.g., ways to streamline general education courses, to, in effect, save large chunks of money by delivering them in other ways (obviating their need through prior AP work, doing them online, etc.). He does not appear to believe that their current marginalization is a significant problem. Those who hurry to become specialized, I would argue, radically reduce their ability to be nimble, since they exclude an array of established disciplines which offer content and methodology which can help ameliorate the limitations imposed by the specialist's blinders.
Professor DeMillo celebrates distinctiveness (appropriately) and urges institutions to, in effect, be their own best selves rather than mimics. I wholeheartedly agree. He then, however, compares Berkeley with Carnegie Mellon, notes that they are very different though they are ranked similarly, for various reasons, and says that they should not try to be like one another. Berkeley, he says, graduates 44% of its students, while CMU graduates 90%. That is fine; they have different missions.
I doubt that number and I don't think it's fine. The flagship publics will have lower graduation rates than the top privates, but 44% (a number common--or lower--at regional publics) is unacceptable. Professor DeMillo celebrates the importance of access, but does not seem at all bothered by the fact that many universities are graduating less than 30% of their students or that significant numbers of students are leaving school (with or without a diploma) with crippling debt and limited skills.
The bottom line is that the author's arguments, examples and foci strike me as disjunct, but the book is filled with ideas that are worthy of attention. The book gives us the relatively unique perspective of an engineer. That perspective involves a host of issues, approaches and anecdotes that those of us in the liberal arts disciplines are likely to overlook. At the same time, the book appears to be blasé with regard to the problems and challenges that continually arise in discussions of higher education by commentators whose focus is the liberal arts. For many of us, for example, "branding" is not the goal; it is the problem--a corporatist norm that evades what I would call "signature"--the curriculum and ethos that constitutes distinctiveness. To some degree this is a question of semantics, but technocratic solutions often overlook academic ones. We have, in many cases, created institutions for consumers rather than for students and the results--en masse--are not always encouraging.
