Defending Disruption, End of College

Defending Disruption, End of College

Top of Mind with Julie Rose

  • Apr 1, 2016 9:00 pm
  • 1:43:55 mins

Defending Disruption (starts at 1:06) Guest: Clayton M. Christensen is the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School; and is regarded as one of the world's top experts on innovation and growth. “Disruptive innovation” been important buzz words in the business world for more than a decade as a way to explain how startups find a foothold at the low-end of a market and then sneak up on established businesses, often causing them to topple. Wide-eyed MBA students study it earnestly and CEOs of well-established organizations like Intel and Salesforce.com adhere to it. The merits of disruptive innovation theory have also been hotly debated by scholars in major publications of late. So much so, that the man who first introduced disruptive innovation to the business world back in the 1990s says it’s now in danger of becoming a victim of its own success. Harvard Business School professor and best-selling author Clayton Christensen recently co-authored an article in the Harvard Business Review reminding us what he really meant when he developed the theory. End of College (starts at 52:07) Guest: Kevin Carey directs the education policy program at the New America Foundation and authored the 2015 book, “The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere.” Getting a college degree is more important than it’s ever been to finding success in the American economy. And yet, for at least 100 years, very little about the process of getting a college degree has changed. Prospective students take standardized tests, wait for an acceptance letter, move to the college, live with other students and sit in classrooms full-time for at least four years in order in order to get a diploma. Kevin Carey says there’s little about that system makes sense today. Who says that four years is the optimal time to master a subject? And does sitting in a huge auditorium being talked at by a professor really amount to effective learning? Kevin Carey directs education policy at the New America Foundation. In his book titled, “The End of College,” he argues – not unlike Harvard’s Clayton Christensen – that technology is about to transform higher education in radical ways. Kevin Carey says the reason it hasn’t happened yet is because of accreditation policies and government regulation that have meant only diplomas from certain institutions matter. .