News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.
I first met Professor Hoy when I returned to UC Santa Cruz in Fall of ’92 to finish my undergraduate…
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Everything you say is true, but what is the alternative? I don’t think people are advocating a return to in-class…
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Agreed with the other commentator. It is extremely unlikely that Pangram’s success is due to its cheating by reading metadata.
I see this question as a bit naïve. There is metadata on every document created by a modern word processor…
I don't know this guy or whether there is anything to his predictions, or he's just another pseudo-expert. But I imagine some readers are well-informed, so please share your knowledge. Does this guy have a sound analytical framework? What do you make of his prognosis? Signed comments will be strongly preferred.
I had not heard of this fellow before, and the story is interesting and plausible. But two considerations make me wonder whether higher education will suffer as much as he thinks (though business schools may be an exception). The first is that the market for universities is now global. As most readers of this blog know, applications are flooding to N. American colleges and graduate programs from around the world (European universities presumably as well). So a decline in demand locally may be more than made up internationally.
The second consideration has to do with online models of education. Berlitz and similar companies ate into language courses taught by schools and universities, and probably for the better. But how much will online courses generally eat into university courses? Right now the audience for the infamous MOOCS seems to be abroad, in countries with fewer excellent universities than we have. Large, impersonal first-year classes may eventually be replaced or enhanced by online components. But it's hard to imagine that the face-to-face teaching that goes on in smaller classes will. There is still a large demand for piano lessons of a very familiar sort, and athletic coaches and assistant coaches seem in no danger of being replaced by online videos. It's hard to see why good instructors face extinction or serious employment problems.
It is a genuinely puzzling question why teaching methods in most fields have not changed enormously in the last couple thousand years. Language instruction has, and some other fields have as well. But the methods of instruction of higher education most of us deploy would be familiar to many instructors of early modern European universities and even to Aristotle (Socrates would have been appalled). I don't think the explanation for lack of change is the familiar one — cartelization, barriers to entry, restriction of competition. It may be that, just as no aspiring tennis player or violinist player would hope to become great by watching online videos, so budding writers or thinkers or historians may wish to learn, one-on-one from other humans, in small settings.
It's an interesting article, but I'm not as worried as he is. My main concern is whether universities can sustain the increased sticker and real costs. But I'm not as worried that online education or alternative delivery methods will undercut brick-and-mortar education. Let me explain why.
Aside from the extracurricular fun, students (and their parents) want three things from college: 1) education, 2) status and credentials, and 3) a post-graduation wage premium. Perhaps online courses can deliver 1 at lower cost. But I'm skeptical that they can deliver 2 and 3.
In first-year-seminar this past semester, I covered a section on the question of why college students receive a wage premium. There are two main hypotheses in economics meant to explain this. The first hypothesis, the "human capital model", says that students develop various skills during college that make them more productive. Since wages are a function of marginal productivity, and since education increases marginal productivity, students make more money after they go to college. The second hypothesis, the "signaling model", says that students make more money because the fact that they A) survived a rigorous screening process to enter college (especially a good college) and B) actually survived four years of sitting in boring classes studying esoteric subjects while jumping through lots of hoops signals to employers that the students are probably 1) perseverant, 2) conscientious, 3) smart 4) conformists. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell–and I hope I'm wrong–the existing empirical evidence in economics and educational psychology strongly favors the signaling model over the human capital model. That's not to say college adds no human capital, but rather that signaling appears to be the dominant explanation for why college students earn more money than others. (A quick way to see this: Notice that a student who quits college with just one class to go makes only a tiny fraction of the wage premium of a student who actually graduates. If wage premiums were about human capital, a graduating student and a student just shy of graduating would make almost the same amount.)
Suppose this literature is right. If so, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that we're not losing our jobs soon, because these alternative educational platforms probably can't deliver the products we're really selling. Sure, they can deliver *education*, but we don't sell education. We sell credentials and status. We sell hoops and signals, so our students' potential employers can engage in rational statistical discrimination. We don't turn chaff into wheat; all we do is separate wheat from chaff.
The bad news is that we are all guilty of bad business ethics. We advertise that we will shape students for the better, but we the evidence is that on average we don't. At best, we provide them with a very narrow set of skills in their major, skills which, despite all our promises to the contrary and all the high-minded stuff we say about liberal learning, they do not transfer or apply to other domains. (Google studies on "transfer of learning.")
This is an interesting theory, but it doesn't really make much sense. He seems to say that always, in every field, market incumbents will be driven out by low-end competitors. But that doesn't really seem like the sort of thing that can be broadly generalized.
Of course, the story is a bit more plausible for universities than for Apple or Tesla. Online competitors to universities can be a *lot* cheaper, though I don't know how to compare the comparative value of what they provide.
My offhand impression of "second tier" schools (based in part on personal experience at having taught at a couple before I got my current job, and also based on what I have heard from some colleagues at such schools) is that most of their students are there so they can check off a box on a job application form. It does not make any difference to them, and it actually does not make much difference to their employers, how they check off that box. Consequently, if people can start getting a crappy online institution to state that they have earned a bachelor's degree, they will flock to those schools. (A friend of mine — one who I hasten to add is actually very smart — got her undergraduate degree from a "third tier" school. She was short two credits, so she took two online courses offered through FEMA: "Animals and Disasters" and "Retrofitting Structures in a Flood Plane." She got the online units transferred to her home school, and she had her degree! A lot of people are going to start doing this for all their units, and cut out the brick and mortar school that is currently the middleman.)
On the other hand, there will always be a demand for "first tier" schools. Some people will want, and some employers will demand, high quality education. Those schools will, I think, survive.
This guy's assessment of universities seems to me to be a bit suspect. There are a couple of reasons why.
First, universities are not businesses. They do not live and die on the basis of whether they can turn a profit. Instead, universities are – and more importantly can be – financially sustained by factors quite distinct from tuition revenue. For some reason, a lot of faculty have bought the canard that what we are literally bringing a commodity to market and attempting to sell it. Accepting this falsehood may lead one immediately to start asking questions about how to cut costs of production and how to charge the highest competitive price. No wonder, for example, that we find ourselves in a crisis in higher education in which teaching labor is increasingly given to lower paid temporary staff.
Second, education of undergraduates is not the only good many universities provide. Universities are the locations for much of our best basic research. Additionally, universities provide distinctive public spaces in which discourse and other creative and expressive activities can happen. There are many other goods provided by universities, some of which may *only* be provided by universities.
If we see education of undergraduates as the sole aim of universities, then we naturally begin to compare the many ways in which that education can be provided. Undoubtedly, there are many alternatives to standard university teaching methods. Some of these alternatives are probably better than these standard methods. But, this would only give us reasons to worry about the future of universities if we see teaching undergraduates as the sole aim of these universities.
If we think about universities more broadly, we might even see the education students receive as coming from the overall experience of living and learning within a certain kind of community. This broader kind of an education is not obviously available via other means such as online courses. This more expansive vision of the university is a little bit extravagant. But, it may be a source of a public good worth funding.
Universities need to change. There needs to be cost cutting. Regardless of whether or not we view education as a commodity, efficiency is good. So, there probably needs to be a lot less middle management, and we might have fewer bells and whistles for undergrads. blah blah blah. But. thinking of universities as nothing more than corporations that produce the commodity of a thin form of undergraduate education seems to me to be a bit off.
@Bryan:
If second- and third-tier schools suffer, there will be fewer (if any) jobs for the graduate students from first-tier school. As a result, fewer (if any) talented undergraduates will go on to graduate school. So there will be less demand for faculty at first-tier schools. And how will first-tier schools teach their undergraduates without graduate-student teaching assistants? The economy of higher education is far too complex for easy predictions.
I am especially wary of complacent predictions based on the wage premium. The premium is usually calculated over a lifetime, or at least a long period. But debt in one's 20s and 30s is far more costly in lifetime utility than in lifetime earnings. Many people need to spend their 20s experimenting with different life-plans — something they can't do if they're chained to educational debt. The fact that they will earn more in their 40s and 50s is poor compensation if those earnings come from an unfulfilling career that they would have avoided if they had knocked around in their 20s. And "millenials" understand this, I believe.
I am also skeptical about the stability of the "signal" sent by completion of a first-tier degree. As first-rate students start attending second-tier schools, the signal degrades. Employers learn that straight-A students from a second- or third-tier school are as good or better than B students from Harvard. And how much will a high-school student be willing to pay for the gamble on getting higher than a B at Harvard? People deny that there is a "higher-education bubble", but the potential cost of a bust is too great to ignore, even if it's highly improbable.
Higher Ed needs to start controlling costs — which means that, yes, instructional productivity has to be improved — which means that, yes, emphasis has to be shifted away from research — which means that, yes, institutions have to stop "racing to the top" of the research rankings (BL take note). And yes, I believe that my own institution is one of the worst in these respects, and most in need of change.
Clay Shirky has some provocative thoughts on this issue that overlap to some extent with Christensen's thinking:
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/11/napster-udacity-and-the-academy/
What Christensen calls traditional higher education's "business model" Shirky calls its "story". They both seem to be saying in part that online delivery will force a fracturing or unraveling of this higher education package into constituent pieces.
The article is Friedmanesque (nuff said). The pushers of our truly cool technological possibilities haven't a clue as to how to work the functional necessities of higher ed: assessment of skills (grading), and dispensing appropriate credentials. The much more real worries are very clearly outlined by philosopher Valerie Hardcastle in her address to the Council of Colleges of Arts and Science (www.ccas.net; look for the link to a pdf on the left sidebar titled "The Academic Arms Race"). The future of higher ed, so far as I can see, is tied to the fate of the Pell grant program; if that goes under, it's Katrina for all of us.
My sense is that "higher education" in America is only minimally about academics. It's more like a coming of age rite, like the insertion of a plate in one's lower lip or something. After "high school" one gets to take all the money one's parents have amassed during one's life, supplement it with a bunch of cash put up by state and Federal taxpayers, and take off to Shangri La for four years. (You can bring a Frisbee, but you a health club membership is included, as are lots of parties and a gluten-free menu.) And don't worry about getting bored there–you'll be going off to…….Mozambique for six months too!!
That the academic portion of this adventure could be delivered for a tenth of the price doesn't seem to make that much difference to anybody. Why stay in your bedroom when you could be on that beautiful quad?
I mean, it IS probably doomed in the long run, but like the lip plate, it'll take considerable doing. There's a lot of emotional investment in the sports, the hook-ups, the dorm life, etc., etc.
In reply to Jason Brennan @10:13: Some interesting thoughts, but consider this. I suspect the following is true: given the sums available for investment, if it is possible to train good programmers, app developers, AI designers, financial mathematicians, fund traders, etc. online, then Google et al will find the way(s) to get it done. So, suppose it is possible. In that case, it may not be long before Google looks to Udacity graduates for its new hires as much or more than it looks to MIT or Caltech. Others, such as Amazon and Facebook, will then follow suit in their hiring practices. Online degrees may, then, eventually come to send an opportunity signal to students and quality signal to employers that overwhelms the rigour/status signal sent by universities. That could lead to many students, at leach in science/tech, choosing online courses over traditional degrees and this would, I suspect, put pressure on the university system as a whole to shrink. So for me the important question is whether online courses are as good at educating as traditional ones because if so, then the signals could change.
In reply to Christopher Morris @9:07: I think you make a good point. However, the market for thinkers, historians, etc. who want and can afford individual instruction may be small enough that the university system as a whole suffers in the way the article predicts: half the institutions bankrupt. I am not as sanguine as the subject of the article that this would be a good thing.
Disruption is taking place and things are changing, but I find Christensen's prediction that half of traditional institutions will go bankrupt undersupported. Online education is definitely increasing its share of the market, both within and outside existing educational institutions. (At UMSL, during the last five years, we've observed an increase in enrollment in our online classes as well as a decrease in enrollment in our traditional classes. The total enrollment is slightly higher.)
As to on-the-job training, it's always existed. The article provides no evidence that on-the-job training will make a bigger difference in the future than it did in the past.
My sense is that traditional educational institutions give students a mixture of four things: (1) status and credentials, (2) intellectual/knowledge skills (information, reading skills, writing skills, solving problems within a discipline, etc.), (3) general professional and social skills (meeting deadlines, following standards, organizing a schedule, presenting to an audience, etc.), (4) a network of connections. All of the above are somewhat valuable to employers.
Online teaching can provide some of the above, but not always to the same degree as traditional teaching. In part to counteract this, there are now national standards for quality online teaching, which some institutions are trying to implement. These standards require good course design and qualified teachers behind the screen, so high quality online teaching creates demand for online teachers in addition to reducing demand for in-class teachers.
In addition, as others have noted, some of (1)-(4) can only be acquired to the highest degree by interacting face-to-face with other human beings.
So purely online institutions are here to stay and existing institutions are evolving and will rely more on online teaching, but I haven't seen strong evidence that half of them will disappear. It's possible that online education puts downward pressure on faculty salaries.
Point of order: the rising cost of education does not mean that instructional productivity needs to be improved. A great deal of that rising cost is found in administrative bloat, especially in the proliferation of deans and deanlets and sub-deans and arch-deans and so on, whose jobs are poorly defined but appear to be largely to collect salaries and take credit for things. Not only does a need to increase instructional productivity not follow from the fact that these parasites have attached themselves to the body of the academy, but it's reasonable to think that NO increase in instructional productivity COULD offset the damage they are causing. Reform proposals focused on the professoriate miss the real problem.
@Kent:
Regarding Clay Shirky and his "provocative thoughts," here is a link to a provocative article opposing Shirky ("Tree Sitting," by Aaron Bady, a grad student at Berkeley):
http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/zunguzungu/tree-sitting/
Bady surely leans more heavily on metaphor than he should, but he makes some interesting points. The first half of the article worries about MOOCs being a clever way in essence to privative public universities; the second half of the article reflects on the pedagogical value of face-to-face classrooms.
Just a taste from the second half:
"Why have a paid instructor reading and grading student work when the students themselves can read and grade each other’s work? It is, after all, cheaper. Well, here is one reason why [http://moreorlessbunk.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/a-class-is-not-a-commune/%5D. But another reason is that autodidacts who live in their own brains are not really in great demand. Even if we reduce the purpose of education down to job training—and this is a huge reduction—education is a process of socialization. Most of the actual knowledge you learn in the course of your education will be forgotten, unused. But the social skills and social knowledge you acquire in the classroom and outside of it is an important part of what makes you the person you are, for better or for worse. If we take a process of socialization and make it a process of anti-socialization—if to be 'at' college, you must be alone in front of a computer—we take the dynamic that creates the legendary poisonous atmosphere of 'the comment thread' and use it to create adults. To my mind, it is impossible to argue for this proposition."
(To be clear, Bady is not opposing all MOOCs; he is just arguing against those who cheerlead for MOOCs as a new paradigm in higher ed fated to replace the old.)
This is in response to Velleman's claim "Employers learn that straight-A students from a second- or third-tier school are as good or better than B students from Harvard."
In my experience being employed in Silicon Valley in the tech industry, and as a TA at institutions as varied as 3rd tier state schools to Ivy League, this is false. In particular, I don't think employers "learn" this because it's far from clear that it's true. Most tech companies I was acquainted with put a very high value on name-brand schooling. Indeed, at one job, I was even tasked with screening applicants and was directly told that I should throw aside anyone with below a 3.7 from lesser schools whereas above 3.0 was sufficient for name-brand schools. I didn't question this decision in light of my experiences as a TA at so many different kinds of schools (and in observing the work habits of the people I worked with at different companies).
The author is quite well-known as a business maven, for what it's worth. Those who are interested might consult the New Yorker profile of him in the issue of May 14, 2012.
It does seem quite likely to me that the very wide distribution of instructional content, especially video on the web but also MOOCs and other interactive media, will increase the size of the population who can learn recondite materials outside the university without having to be brilliant autodidacts. This is a threat to universities' business models to the extent to which they depend on restricted access to advanced instruction, a factor that may be underestimated in the discussion on this page, perhaps because the benefit of a philosophical education doesn't depend very much on the student's mastery of a standardized body of knowledge and expertise, but rather in the development of certain intellectual abilities. It is not a threat to supplant the ability of outstanding faculty to provide high-level feedback to students' work, a necessary component for students to benefit from advanced instruction: good teachers will always be needed. But in most fields outside the humanities, the credentialing monopoly of universities may well be at risk.
This may be compounded if trend of the diminishing earning advantage for the bachelor's degree over the past few years continues. At some point, young adults will not choose to attend traditional 4-year colleges if they don't expect to be able to meet the loan burden.
The great expansion of American higher education in the 1950s and 1960s depended on the perceived need for a bachelor's degree to enter the middle-class workforce, and the bachelor's has continued to serve as a simple basic qualification without much attention to the question of exactly what it is supposed to imply about the abilities of the job candidate. The less predictive power the bachelor's degree has for prospective employers, the less perceived value it will have for young adults, and that suggests that many colleges may have to get smaller or cheaper, causing the professoriat to continue to shrink in size, earning power, and prestige.
Perhaps the main problems will arise if one or more ‘first-tier’ universities get into online degrees in a big way, so that most students have a choice of an online degree with Harvard, MIT etc or an ‘in the flesh’ degree with a second or third tier institution. Which would count more with employers? Or more relevantly, what would students think employers will think? If students think that employers will value online degrees sufficiently highly, and if they can avoid plunging tens of thousands of dollars into debt by taking online degrees, then they will take online degrees.
Even if it is true that much of the value of doing a degree in the flesh is in learning things which cannot be learnt online, will prospective students (who are the one’s making the decisions) think that, or think that employers will think that? I doubt it.
As for having fun, I suspect that most prospective students would think that if they were going to spend fifty thousand dollars on having fun, going to university would not be top of the list. (Living in Mozambique whilst studying online, maybe…)
Faced with two students, who both took the same set of MIT exams, but one of whom studied for them online and the other of whom attended in the flesh, wouldn’t most employers simply take the one with the higher grades? Many would think it tougher to study online and value that…
Finally, I expect that online students (for example, someone in the south taking an online degree with MIT) would still attend a local college for tutorials, group discussions and so on. Or at least engage in such activities via skype. But providing such services would be a comedown for second and third tier universities.
Many people (and comments here) seem to view MOOCs and the like as direct substitutes for a tradition 4 year undergrad degree, and as a direct substitute, it's clear that they do a poor job with signalling and wage premium.
But the model of innovation Christensen is describing isn't so much about direct substitution but rather partial substitution. The 4 year degree is the premium model which likely provides greater benefits but at much higher cost than many students need or want.
The disruption to traditional higher ed is more likely to occur by providers who offer lower levels of education at much lower cost but sufficient for signalling & wage premiums. I don't think that MOOCs will do this in their present form but more vocational orientated services like Dev Bootcamp (http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/10/dev-boot-camp-is-a-ruby-success/) already seem to be capable of undercutting undergrad CS degrees.
In some MBA-ish, orga studies, and STS-ish circles, Christensen is pretty much their guru. Basically, he took the "creative destruction" bit from Schumpeter and conflated it with the McLuhan-branchers of media evolution and translated it into the "consultant speak" (TM)….. It's like throwing mud at the wall. You say it a hundred times about a hundred different products, and with one it'll stick….. Here, it depends if you want to see academia as "a technology". On the other hand, beware of "collective subjects", like the(!) economy, the(!) market, the(!) government, etc., etc. Will academia in 15, 30, 50, 100 years look like academia today? No, of course not. That prediction holds whenever you make it. Will a field that cannot be measured in "business terms" fail in business terms? Well, yes if you keep insisting on measuring it so and the actors accept being judged on these terms; no if you accept that these measures are useless for academia….. What sets me off is that instead of having a serious debate about what we want academia too be like, what it should be like, and how we get there, we have too many debates on issues that have little actual meaning for the serious issues at stake. Let me throw some mud on the wall, too, and see if it sticks: Any area that doesn't evolve and that turns into monocultures of mind will self-destruct in a tragedy of the commons, business-administrated academia is gonna be an example case.
I am surprised at this discussion. Maybe we can look at some data to bring it back to earth.
University enrollment is increasing. According to the NSF, enrollment in higher education was projected to increase 16% between 2008 and 2019. Maybe half of that increase will occur at institutions primarily granting associate's degrees. If there is any location where we might expect online teaching and other "disruptive" forms of training to have an impact, it will probably be there.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, between 1994 and 2009, enrollment nearly *doubled* at doctoral/research universities – the top tier universities. Projections are that this trend will continue more or less unabated.
Now, suppose that "disruptive" education systems – MOOCs – become common. Here's the question that people need to answer: Will the MOOCs and similar technologies sufficiently diminish the *booming* demand for traditional education such that this alone will cause a crisis in "traditional" universities?
My guess is this. MOOCs and their ilk will make a certain educational experience available to people with less money. Prior to this point, these people did not get degrees, or even plan to get degrees, at traditional colleges and universities. These people will be the ones who use MOOCs. I see little evidence that enough people who typically plan to receive a traditional college and university education will swap out those plans for the MOOC-style education to cause a massive disruption in enrollment figures for traditional universities.
This is why I believe that *if* there is going to be a technology-driven disruption to the postsecondary education system, it will probably be a disruption to the approximately 1,000 community colleges in the United States. I doubt the antecedent will be satisfied though. At least, I have not encountered an economist, or anyone else, who has offered any compelling, data-based reason to believe so.
More likely is that state funding for postsecondary education will drop precipitously for entirely political reasons, *not* market-based. For example, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, "state funding per enrolled student dropped in constant dollars by 20%, going from $10,195 per student in 2002 to $8,157 per student in 2010" (http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c2/c2s.htm#sb2).
Consequently, I believe that politically motivated massive decreases in both direct legislative allocation to universities and indirect grant funding through agencies like the NSF and NEH (b/c the NSF and the NEH will be defunded by the federal gov't) pose the far greater threat than MOOCs.
What will probably happen, then, is that as funding cuts for colleges and universities begin to destroy these institutions, people will start saying, heads firmly up posteriors, "See I told you so – the internet is killing the traditional university."
It is worth noting, by the way, that the rise of online education is concentrated almost entirely in the for-profit education sector. This is not surprising: Online education makes sense as an educational strategy only if we view education as a commodity sold in a market. Many people have a far more complicated view of education. Since recent immigrants and their children will be among those who are driving the increase in demand for postsecondary education (a projected 12% increase in enrollment between 2008 – 2019), it is worth asking whether attending college and university might have significant social meaning in these communities. If so, then the transactional view of postsecondary education – roughly, I pay you money, you give me a chance to get a diploma – is woefully inadequate. People will prefer, and consequently there will be higher demand for, a traditional educational experience. This is speculation, I know, but given the wild speculation that Christensen engages in, I do not think that my musings are out of place.
As is pointed out by Dave Kinkead in #17 neither Christensen nor Shirky claim MOOCs as replacement packages for the entire bundle of perceived value provided by traditional universities. Your excerpt from Bady seems to miss the point. What Bady calls "the process of socialization" will of course not be provided by online content, hence the unbundling.
I fear I might be a little late to the discussion and apologize in advance for the length, but nevertheless hope to offer something helpful. I am a second-year MBA student at Harvard Business School (where Clayton Christensen is a Professor). I did my undergraduate at St. John's College, Santa Fe, so, while I claim no formal training in Philosophy, in many important ways my academic background might be more similar to this blog's readership's than to the typical Business School student's.
Prof. Christensen is widely considered the leading management thinker in the world right now. His work has revolutionized business strategy, and no credible graduate management program would fail to include his theories in its strategy curriculum. I myself am currently taking a course designed by Prof. Christensen that deals specifically with his theories (though unfortunately I am not in a section taught by him).
To address Prof. Leiter's first question, "Does this guy have a sound analytical framework?": Though he would disagree, as explanations for How The World Really Works, Prof. Christensen's theories absolutely do not. But this is predictable as neither does little, if any, management theory or economics, an observation that surfaces quite frequently in this blog. Citing Robert Paul Wolff, Prof. Leiter has made this point before in a post worth revisiting (http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2012/01/will-wilkinson-a-profile-in-ideological-blindness.html).
As analytical frameworks for understanding certain behaviors of "fully acculturated members of capitalist societies", Prof. Christensen's theories are sound, and are among the very best we have. That's not to say there are not some unaddressed weaknesses in his argument: For example, to the best of my knowledge, he doesn't really consider the possibility many examples of "disruptive innovation" are more functions of the political and macroeconomic environment than the decisions of managers (this, I think, stems at least in part from the management academy's senseless dismissal of critiques along the lines of Prof. Wolff's). There is also some skepticism whether the kind of technological progress that "disrupts" industries is identifiable ex ante.
Nevertheless, I would take his prognosis very seriously. This forum is perhaps not the best place to provide support for why in great detail, but here's an outline of the argument:
1) Any organization can be accurately modeled as a business firm provided a critical mass of people behave as if it is. This seems very much to be the case in the nation's universities (think of all the Donors, Administrators, "Star" Faculty, Professional and Pre-professional Students, the Employees who just want to get paid, and the Government, all of whom clearly exhibit such behavior, and the great number of others who either do nothing or are unable to stop them from doing so). Prof. Christensen's theories are among, if not, the best for describing the behavior of business firms in a capitalist society. Therefore, we should consider their implications seriously.
2) If we think Prof. Christensen's predictions are susceptible to changes in the Political Economy, we should look to see what's happening in the Political Economy. At present, a straightforward analysis of such would show that conditions are growing increasingly favorable for incumbents to be "disrupted". Consider, for example, universities' "credentialing" and research functions. What is the nature of credentialing in an increasingly unequal society, where one's course in life is increasingly a function of one's parent's station? And likewise, with respect to research, instead of direct subsidy, Government is increasingly supporting research through (unconscionable) Intellectual Property rights and Tax Policy. If universities are forced to serve only those of us who are children of the affluent, or have been found otherwise acceptable thereby, or to become "think tanks" or R&D centers, would this not be sufficient evidence they have been “disrupted?”
3) The "ex ante" skepticism certainly refutes the specificity with which Prof. Christensen claims universities will be disrupted, but as a corollary to it, we should be just as skeptical of claims that technological innovation will never disrupt our existing modes of providing goods and services (or that use the term "unlikely" when what seems really wanted to be said is "never"). According to the logic of capitalism, once Kaplan uses its technology to serve test prep customer, we can expect Kaplan, in pursuit of new customers in need of whatever kind of instruction, to continuously fiddle with its technology until it succeeds in its efforts to serve such customers, such customers become "unattractive", the firm is liquidated, it is forced by factors outside of "the Market" to cease its behavior, or the world ends.
4) The reason why it so difficult for firms to prevent themselves from being disrupted is that disruption is only partially enabled by new entrants' cost advantage. Disruption also requires that there are customers or potential customers in the market who are presently being "overserved" by incumbents (i.e. they require less functionality than is being offered and consequently are, or would be, paying for more than they want). As a result, surviving "disruption" not only requires incumbents to change their cost structure to be competitive with the new entrants', but to simultaneously strip functionality from their goods & services. When organizations are able to do this, it is known in the business world as "self-disruption" and, as you can imagine, can carry with it some pretty vile consequences for ordinary people. For a variety of reasons, experience has shown most business firms are unable to accomplish self-disruption. A critical mass of people behave as if universities are business firms, so we should assume no different with regards thereto.
5) If they want to avoid "disruption", it would seem universities could so by either: getting a critical mass of people to stop behaving as they (universities) are business firms; or, effecting appropriate changes in the Political Economy. How exactly are they going to?
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