Class News

Len Baker ’64 made dire predictions about higher education

April 30, 2021

Terry Holcombe ’64 re-read Len Baker’s speech at the kickoff panel of our 50th Class Reunion. Titled “Seven Reasons Why Elite Universities Such as Yale will be Blindsided by Change over the Next Generation,” it makes dire predictions, some of which appear to be coming true today. See Len’s speech below.

On a different theme, Len’s venture-capital firm, Sutter Hill Ventures, was saluted in the Wall Street Journal. “Sutter Hill’s Snowflake bet eclipses some of the biggest returns in U. S. startup history.”

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Seven Reasons Why Elite Universities Such as Yale will be Blindsided by Change over the Next Generation

Notes for talk on panel at Yale 50th reunion, May 30, 2014

by G. Leonard Baker, Jr.

Elite private universities will experience more change and more threats over the next generation than over the last several generations.

Universities underestimate these threats.

1. Teaching and learning will change.

Technologies like Khan Academy and MOOCs like Coursera will make material more widely available and in a form customized to each student. Student progress will be tracked individually. These technologies are still in infancy. Over a decade or two, pedagogy and technology will co-evolve; new tools will spur experiments in teaching and vice-versa. Novel forms of teaching will develop. We can’t foresee the outcome or pick winners today. Things that seem like video games will be powerful learning tools. Not everything we know will become obsolete; some subjects will be taught in traditional ways; a John Gaddis or Vincent Scully lecture will still be priceless (though perhaps delivered over YouTube); other subjects, like basic language and math, already benefit from new technologically-enabled formats.

What’s often overlooked is that a generation of students, raised on iPads and video games, will grow up with differently wired brains. Brains are plastic neural networks that wire themselves in response to stimuli, most rapidly during childhood. Our grandkids’ neural networks are different; their cognitive processes don’t track with folks like us whose brains matured under older sorts of stimulation. They think and learn differently — more trial-and-error, less logical and planful. We can’t understand how they think no matter how hard we try. This is not speculation; it can be shown empirically with tools like functional MRI. Differently wired brains demand different teaching tools which, in turn, create even more divergent cognitive processes.

2. Business models are unsustainable.

University costs have outpaced inflation for decades. If you extrapolate tuition rates or cost elements for another generation, they become absurd. It’s rapidly reaching the point where individual cost elements become impossible to justify.

The business model is already stressing many private universities.

3. Credentialing will change.

The college degree, including the Ph.d, will be less valuable as a predictor of performance. Many college degrees have become dumbed-down as incoming students are ill-prepared, contact hours have declined, homework is vanishing, and teachers are viewed more as entertainers of students-as-customers rather than standard-setters. Grades have either inflated or disappeared. Students and faculty are implicitly conspiring to abandon college performance as a signal of competence.

At the same time, alternative new and better tools for assessing skill, energy, and attitude are emerging: peer reputation through social network (such as the next generation of Linked-in), advanced and validated testing (like Google uses for new employees), “page-ranking” of people and their accomplishments. Still better credentialing tools are coming along from Silicon Valley and elsewhere, incented by competition for talent and the rising difference in value between the excellent and the mediocre.

4. The nature of research will change.

Technology will make new methods of knowledge discovery more productive than traditional ones. One example is the rise of big data — the ability to use machines to find subtle patterns in extremely large amounts of unstructured information. Laws of physics, biology, and math that we haven’t yet found will be discovered by computers, perhaps using logical processes inaccessible to human brains. In effect, we will begin to rely on machines for breakthrough insights. The best researchers will not necessarily be the best intellects — rather they will be people of sufficient intellect who can interface well with their machine-collaborators. Attribution will become harder and the current rules of the game won’t work.

5. Universities’ authority over the canon of knowledge will erode.

Peer review will take a different form. Authoritative scholarly journals are losing their central place as alternative methods of peer review emerge. Recent data shows that published science experiments often can’t be replicated. The search for what’s true and what’s eternally valuable will carry on in more diffuse ways, more often through social networks and other forms of collaborative filtering.

6. Merit will become politically incorrect. The elite will come under attack.

The postwar generation funneled resources toward achievers. This was thought to be inherently good as well as beneficial to society. Today, income inequality (largely the result of technology) is a major social problem and a hot political topic. Those who are smart and well-motivated will be thought merely to have won the gene lottery and the parent lottery and no longer entitled to extra educational resources. The result is that the political legitimacy of elite universities will be an easy target for populist attack.

7. Adaptability will be the key to survival; elite universities will be slow to change.

Elite universities have strong buffers against adapting: tradition, prestige, faculty-as-labor-union organization structures, decentralized (and diffuse) governance, endowment wealth to buffer them against stress. Perhaps the poorest, most stressed schools will be forced to adapt more quickly.

Technology creates a world of vast possibilities where products, services, and new social phenomena such as the iPad, Facebook, and Khan Academy emerge unexpectedly, often the few successes among many failed attempts. Universities will be blindsided by competition from unforeseen ways of unbundling their mission and accomplishing pieces of it. One cannot predict exactly what form this competition will take, but it’s clear that the competition is coming and that today’s university governance is underestimating it.