Higher education is now ground zero for disruption — from forbes.com by Todd Hixon

Excerpt:

Why? US Higher Ed has a product that does not work, ridiculous costs, and an antiquated business model. For many years we accepted this because we see extraordinary value in education. Now, most middle and upper-middle class parents find they cannot give their children the education they enjoyed. Technology has recently put a spark to this fuel: on-line education works and dramatically improves costs and access. This is a big opportunity for entrepreneurs and investors. Many new companies and programs will emerge in 2014.

 

Also see:

What the flattening industry means for higher education — from evoLLLution.com by Mark Greenfield

Excerpt:

Higher education is getting flattened. Flattening happens “when the impact of the Internet and globalization render an industry unrecognizable, and in many cases, obsolete.”[1] The term is taken from “The World Is Flat,” the seminal book written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas Friedman.

So, do I think higher education will become obsolete? No. But do I think higher education will become unrecognizable? Absolutely.

 

Why 6 colleges are cutting tuition — from educationdive.com by Daniel Shumski

Excerpt:

Amid news that the “sticker price” for college tuition is often a work of fiction — there are at least 200 colleges where no one pays full price for their education — some schools have been striking out in a different direction. They’re lowering their prices across the board in a practice sometimes called a “tuition reset.”

The idea is simple: Rather than tempting students with big discounts, administrators are hoping that applying a lower tuition more consistently will help them stand out. In most cases, the schools maintain that it’s not about taking in less money in the aggregate and that their programs will not suffer.

So what kinds of numbers are we talking about? Here are six schools that cut their tuition drastically, along with a look at the hard numbers and what the school had to say about the price drop.

 

The Amazon of higher education — from slate.com by Gabriel Kahn
How tiny, struggling Southern New Hampshire University has become a behemoth.

Excerpt:

Five years ago, Southern New Hampshire University was a 2,000-student private school struggling against declining enrollment, poor name recognition, and teetering finances.

Today, it’s the Amazon.com of higher education. The school’s burgeoning online division has 180 different programs with an enrollment of 34,000. Students are referred to as “customers.” It undercuts competitors on tuition. And it deploys data analytics for everything from anticipating future demand to figuring out which students are most likely to stumble.

“We are super-focused on customer service, which is a phrase that most universities can’t even use,” says Paul LeBlanc, SNHU’s president.

Addendum on 1/9/14:

MOOCs ain’t over — from christenseninstitute.org by Michelle Rhee-Weise

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Over the last month, journal headlines have been heralding the death of massive online open courses (MOOCs). You could almost hear the sigh of relief from the academy. With Sebastian Thrun himself acknowledging the “lousy” quality of the MOOC product, told-you-so skeptics have been giddily pointing out that Udacity, in its failure to disrupt higher education, is now moving on to vocational training.

Sadly, what audiences are missing is that Thrun’s shift to workforce training is precisely what has the potential to disrupt and severely impact traditional postsecondary education. We at the Christensen Institute have already written extensively about how MOOCs were not displaying the right markers for disruption (see here, here, here, and here), but we became more hopeful as they started to offer clusters of courses. Coursera announced Foundations of Business with Wharton, while edX and MITX introduced the Xseries in Computer Science as well as Supply Chain & Logistics. These moves appeared to map better to employer needs and what we describe as areas of nonconsumption. In their turn away from career-oriented training, colleges and universities have unwittingly left unattended a niche of nonconsumers—people over-served by traditional forms of higher education, underprepared for the workforce, and seeking lifelong learning pathways.