The Great Upheaval: Higher Education's Past, Present, and Uncertain Future

by Arthur Levine

Six developments stand out in the digital disruption of the newspaper business—the invention of the internet; the advent of mobile digital devices; the rise of digital content producers, aggregators, and distributors; the arrival of blogs, podcasts, tweets, and other innovations in news packaging; the creation of social media; and changing consumer tastes.

Successful businesses were built during the Industrial Revolution. They faced and overcame adversity from competitors and regulators. They were undone by the digital technology revolution.

newspaper business adapted.

They differ in their financial models. The movie and music industries have historically made their money by selling a product to buyers—films and records and more recently music tracks. By contrast, newspaper revenue has come principally from selling the buyers of their product to advertisers. By design, the price of a newspaper is less than the cost of producing it.

The commonalities in the accounts of the three industries loom far larger and more powerfully for higher education. They speak to the hows, whys, and extent to which those industries changed in the face of the same demographic, economic, and technological shifts facing the nation’s colleges and universities. Thirteen commonalities stand out: 1. All three industries developed their business models during the Industrial Revolution, reflecting the practices of the age, such as assembly-line production processes and fixed time and location distribution. 2. They clung tenaciously to that model and to its products—albums, physical movies, and newspapers—until the model broke and even after. 3. All three industries used the same strategy to respond to environmental change, seeking to make the minimum alterations in their business models necessary to accommodate them in piecemeal fashion by means of reform, repair, and adaptation. 4. All three attempted to employ that same strategy even as their industries were being disrupted and they were threatened with replacement. The organizational knee-jerk response was maintenance by adaptation, rooted in piecemeal over wholistic organizational change. 5. Demographic and economic changes did not alter the business model in any of the three industries. 6. All three were disrupted by digital technology. 7. The three industries did not see the digital technology threat coming, nor did they recognize the magnitude of the change i...

Institutional control of higher education will decrease, and the power of higher education consumers will increase.