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What Higher Education Can Learn From The Fall Of The Newspapers

POST WRITTEN BY
Frederick Singer
This article is more than 8 years old.

I started my career at the Washington Post in the early nineties, back when it was hugely profitable, a pillar of the media establishment and seemingly protected from disruption by huge printing presses, delivery trucks, and a century of consumer reading habits. Although newspapers experimented with the Internet from the very beginning, they were slow to make structural changes required to deal with the decline of revenues from classified advertising and the erosion of geographical barriers as new forms of media moved online. We all know how the story ended. The newspaper industry still remains, but even the most important news institutions are a shadow of their former selves.

Today, technology is also changing the way that even the most venerable institutions of higher education operate at a difficult time when even the value of the degree is being called into question. Students face a multiplicity of options to acquire knowledge outside of colleges and universities. Colleges and universities will adapt and unbundle, some argue, or go the way of the local newspaper. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Visionary institutions are already making smart, competitive choices without disrupting their values or upsetting faculty. The analogy is imperfect but instructive. So what might higher education learn from the newspaper industry?

Reengineer and Protect Your Most Profitable Courses

Disruptive threats nearly always start with an attack on the large sources of profit. In the newspaper industry, the first real blow was not the replacement of the traditional newsroom as we initially feared: it was the erosion of classified revenue that paid for the newsroom by companies with weird names like eBay and Monster.

In higher education, the real threat won’t be a frontal assault on core degree programs, but the erosion of the most profitable continuing education courses and graduate programs. Coding bootcamps aren’t likely to expand their focus to challenge the preeminence of the degree any time soon. But the explosion of non-accredited programs is beginning to threaten the MBA. They have proven that they can iterate quickly and deliver a more modern learning product at a fraction of the price. Higher education will never be replaced, but the most profitable courses will be attacked, creating revenue implications that have a ripple effect across institutions.

Interactivity Matters

In the nineties, editors and journalist were terrified of unstructured dialogue with their readers. They wanted both the content and the discussions curated. As a result, newspapers were slow to develop communities online. New market entrants, meanwhile, thrived by cultivating a two-way relationship with readers. From AOL chat rooms to instant messaging, Twitter, and Facebook, new media is typified by greater consumer choice and the ability to engage in real time.

In the education world, we know that student engagement can have a massive impact on outcomes. Active, flipped or blended classrooms activate millennial learners who crave control over how they engage with material. Students are looking beyond the bookstore or library to Youtube or Amazon for online materials and study aids. Passive consumption of classes and content doesn’t square with the experience of screenagers who came of age in the Internet era. Visionary professors are capitalizing on the explosion of mobile devices in the lecture hall to capture the attention and develop new modalities of teaching. Course scheduling is beginning to look more like Kayak than a traditional registrar, providing students with great choice and transparency into their path to completion. Creating a more interactive path for students is not just an esoteric problem for the classroom, but is also the foundation for schools improving outcomes and revenue.

Real Time Data Matters

The third big lesson that newspapers were slow to realize was the importance of leveraging real-time reader data to shape editorial decision making. In 1994 and 1995, when our editors received their first “click through” reports, it was the first time that they could actually see in detail what was being read and where the engagement online was occurring. In the analog world, our editors were flying blind, relying on customer polls to understand reader habits. Over time, they began to understand how news was consumed story-by-story to make daily adjustments that captivated readers, and culminated in new “paywall” strategies.

When I talk to presidents and provosts, they often share a similar concern. They are awash in data from online courses that can be used to inform instructional design and improve outcomes, but the brick-and-mortar classes that most of their students attend remain a black box. Today, professors are limited to rudimentary data from the LMS, midterms, and assignments to understand how students are progressing. They have virtually no data to understand not just whether, but how a student is engaging with the material. Is she asking questions? Why not? Did students pre-read materials before class? Are they collaborating after class? Without the ability to understand student behavior, our professors are forced to teach without the most basic feedback mechanisms. At the same time, online courses and emerging modalities are designed from the ground up to track student behavior, providing a competitive advantage and putting pressure on traditional higher education.

There are many valuable lessons for leaders of universities and colleges to extract from the experience of the newspaper industry in the nineties. Both industries shared huge barriers to entry and very complex internal dynamics within the institution that made change more difficult to execute. By focusing on the key areas of threats, leveraging the power of engagement to redefine the offering, and using real-time behavioral data to iterate, institutions can not only match the threat, but emerge with the opportunity to extend their mission and scope as hubs for lifelong learning. Incumbents can win wars of disruption if they move quickly and at scale. Let us hope that is the story we can tell our colleagues in a decade.