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When budgets are cut, reduced spending is a natural consequence. This is a widely accepted cause and effect relationship being proved out all over the world.

There is also a pervasive notion that if spending is reduced, then a decrease in quality or level of output must follow. For instance, there are countless examples of companies reducing their quality standards or giving you less for the same price in an effort to reduce their costs.

In higher education, this thinking can translate into the assumption that increasing the number of students an institution graduates in a given period of time, without an increase in spending, must lead to a reduction of quality in the education those students will receive.

This is certainly a fair concern given the myriad examples of this sort of correlation between quality, quantity, and cost. But couldn’t there be another possibility? Could it be that economic challenges are presenting us with an opportunity to cultivate new perspectives that will allow us to adapt to the complex challenges of our world? (See our previous post, Physicists, Elephant, & Innovative Thought).

So many of our human-designed systems—industrial, governmental, educational etc.—were constructed in a different time and based on many outdated circumstances and assumptions, leaving them ripe for review, re-evaluation, and renewal.

This is certainly the case for our system of higher education in the United States, where there is mounting pressure on long-established institutions to reduce costs and increase their number of graduates, if they are to stay relevant and support this country’s need for a well-educated citizenry and workforce. As Mark Yudof, president of the University of California system, recently said, “It cannot work as currently constructed.”

While we certainly would not argue against the requests of many for increased federal spending on education, we suspect that the next great wave of innovation in higher education will emerge due to financial pressure that will compel people in the system to completely re-think how we educate people in the United States, if we are to thrive in this new era.

In the last year, we at Catalytica have witnessed and documented what could be the beginnings of a monumental shift within the higher education systems of several states. These states are responding to changing social and economic circumstances by re-considering long-established practices, adopting new perspectives, and exploring collaborative approaches to educating students.

Among the participants in these state programs, there has been natural resistance to change, and apprehension about reducing the process of education to that of an assembly line. Yet those involved in these projects understand that higher education must evolve and have taken pioneering steps to move it forward.

The Tuning USA project, led by faculty from Minnesota, Indiana and Utah, is one such endeavor. These state teams have focused on making degrees more pertinent to the needs of today’s students; enhancing the quality of student learning; and reducing redundancy in the process of earning a degree.  The pilot effort crosses long-held boundaries dividing institutions—2-year vs. 4-year, public vs. private, large vs. small—to clearly define what students need to know, understand and be able to demonstrate to attain degrees that are relevant to their pursuits after graduation.

Of course faculty are not alone in addressing the significant challenges faced by our system of higher education. There are, in fact, related efforts being undertaken by the full spectrum of higher education stakeholders and thought partners, each intersecting with and expanding beyond the work of the others, like concentric circles. We will explore some of these other efforts in future posts.

That said, faculty will be fundamental to a national effort to develop collaborative and holistic ways of working to meet the new reality we face; and, if enough key stakeholders join the effort, together they may create a new relationship between quality, quantity, and cost.

Learn more about  the Tuning USA project and hear from participants in the videos below. And please take a moment to let us know what you think of these videos: if they are helpful to you; and if you intend to share them with others.

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Watch all of Catalytica’s Higher Education Videos on YouTube.