What High Tech Can Teach Higher Ed

6. It seems that where all this is heading is toward competency-based education and away from a focus on degrees. In our recent curriculum design work at Darden, we have focused on building three groups of competencies: knowledge (“know what”), skills (“know how”), and attributes of character (“know why.”)  The didactic content in graduate management education will move away from universities and onto the web. This stuff is “know what,” the content of lectures and textbooks.  As this knowledge grows ubiquitously available, it will cease to distinguish institutions in preparing people for professional life. But skills (“know how”) and attributes of character (“know why”) will grow in significance in distinguishing institutions. Our high-engagement pedagogy and our curriculum design work at Darden position us well to deliver “know how” and “know why.” I expect that we will see a growing number of imitators.

7. Quality, mobility, ubiquity. Smartphone sales will outpace sales of personal computers (if they haven’t already.) Growth in bandwidth is improving the quality of delivery; video plays a fundamental role in the way we build relationships. Something like 90% of communication is non-verbal. You can get what you want where you want it. Based on our observations of university students today, we will see an inexorable demand for the digitization of higher education and for the delivery of educational experiences across a variety of devices.

8. Social networking continues to grow at a very rapid pace. Email is old technology; as our students know, in a world of growing spam, social networks can help you get what you need or want to know. Firms are now employing social networks to promote collaboration on new product development, sales force management, and operations of many kinds. The transference to academic settings would seem to be straightforward, to create “learning communities” that engage experts, broaden access, induce collaboration, enrich learning experiences, and collect data.

9. Tech companies are monitoring and engaging their customer base in extraordinarily detailed ways. We heard several examples of “A/B testing” in which the companies modify their software in real time to test functionality and see which promotes higher engagement. Tech companies would love to see B-schools prepare MBAs more deeply in data analytics and data visualization, to present insights in a way that is exciting. One manager said, “It is amazing how important the skill of storytelling has become.” Given the rapid pace of change, tech firms are less inclined to strategic planning. Another manager said, “It our business, traditional strategic planning has zero value. The cost of failure on the web [with A/B testing] is close to zero. Strategic planning is a risk minimization device” that is being supplanted by A/B testing. Strategy becomes all about learning and experimentation; and experiments in tech cost relatively little to create.

10. What the tech industry wants from MBA schools are leaders, people who can create change and constantly reinvent the business. The business environment is morphing rapidly; MBAs there must be able to thrive in an environment with ambiguity and no set structure. They must think analytically and be able to collaborate with engineers. In the tech industry, the engineers are “the talent,” not the MBAs. MBAs must let go of the aspiration of “being in charge.” Organizations are inverting. More of the control is coming from bottom up. Tech companies especially want people who have built things, tried things, and experimented. “What I learned in school” doesn’t cut much ice. Tech companies want people who are willing to think about their careers as an adventure rather than a ladder.

The kinds of changes described above will be very expensive for higher education.  Schools will need to acquire new technology, new talent, new skills, and a lot of money to fund it all.  If anything is going to drive the Economist’s vision of “Trouble in the Middle,” it is new information technology. It is not immediately clear which institutions will survive.

Rankings and other metrics may tell us who the strongest or most intelligent institutions are—but as Charles Darwin said, it is the most adaptable who will survive. And there’s the rub: adaptability is neither evenly distributed nor naturally given to academic institutions.

Robert Bruner is the Dean of the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia and co-author of the report, “Globalization of Management Education,” AACSB International, 2011. Read his blog posts on education and other topics.