Trading one good boss for another

Today, the Minerva Schools at KGI announced its two new latest academic appointments:

The Minerva Schools at KGI, offering a reinvented university experience for the brightest and most motivated students from around the world, today announced the appointments of Dr. Eric Bonabeau as Dean of the College of Computational Sciences, and Dr. James D. Sterling as the Director of Minerva Labs and interim Dean of the College of Natural Sciences. The two join Dr. Stephen M. Kosslyn, Founding Dean, and Dr. Daniel Levitin, Dean of the College of Arts & Humanities, as key academic leaders at the Minerva Schools at KGI.

An entrepreneur and expert on adaptive computing algorithms, Bonabeau’s book Swarm Intelligence is one of the sources cited by Michael Crichton’s novel Prey. (Ironically, my former KGI co-worker Christoph Adami is also credited).

But it’s the other announcement that’s the big news at KGI:

Dr. James D. Sterling, previously Dean of the School of Applied Life Sciences and current Vice President for Academic Affairs at Keck Graduate Institute (KGI), will serve as Director of Minerva Labs, and has also been appointed interim Dean of the College of Natural Sciences. Dr. Sterling holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from California Institute of Technology, and is an alumnus of Texas A&M University where he earned a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering. As a founding faculty member of KGI, Dr. Sterling developed the engineering coursework that prepares students to work in the development of laboratory research tools, laboratory automation, and micro-bioanalytical methods. In addition, Dr. Sterling serves as chair of the academic dean’s committee of The Claremont Colleges consortium.

“I’m thrilled to be joining Minerva and creating a new kind of university experience for undergraduate students,” said Dr. Sterling. “I’m particularly excited and intrigued by the educational innovations we are developing and look forward to leveraging Minerva’s learning platform and new methods in laboratory automation to educate students in the College of Natural Sciences."

Neither Minerva nor KGI mentions that Sterling is co-founder of one of KGI’s first spinoffs, Claremont BioSolutions.

Jim Sterling, Minerva CEO Ben Nelson
and KGI President Sheldon Schuster

Jim was my boss from when I joined KGI in July 2011 until last Thursday, when he stepped down as SALS dean. He was a great boss, one of the best in my entire career. For many bosses — including my first few years at my own company — being the boss is about the boss. Although very busy, Jim was always scrupulously fair to his employees — perhaps due to that engineering mindset that something is fair or isn’t.

We wish Jim well in his new position, and I’m confident he’ll bring great expertise and management skills to launching the labs, getting the college off the ground and helping the school prepare for its first class next fall.

My new boss (i.e. the interim dean) is KGI’s longest-tenured business faculty, Steve Casper, who taught at Cambridge’s Judge business school before joining KGI in 2003. In innovation studies, most people know Steve for his research on biotech clusters, particularly in Germany and California. Steve is the reason I’m at KGI, so I look forward to working with him on building KGI’s programs and opportunities for its students.

Higher ed disruption: zig when others zag

It seems like every spring I write a posting about disruption facing higher education. It is a topic of interest to my coworkers and the many academics among my blog readers — and also an interesting strategy problem where I have a front row seat.

In the past year, one of the big surprises has been the large amount of private investment in tech startups targeting this market. They seem particularly concentrated in developing platforms to enable MOOCs, i.e. massively open online courses.

Stanford is front and center in the revolution. A friend (Chuck Eesley) has been leading the Venture Lab experiment at Stanford. Meanwhile, my previous employer (San Jose State) has been at the center of national controversy as faculty are attempting to fight an experiment with Udacity (another Stanford startup) because faculty (not unreasonably) feel it will someday put them out of a job. Meanwhile, Coursera (a 3rd Stanford spinoff) and edX (started by my alma mater) are also promoting MOOC efforts.

The MOOCs seem to tilt the scale on the longstanding efficiency vs. effectiveness argument. The US higher education is pretty effective for people who get in, who apply themselves and can afford to pay for it. However, it’s very expensive (and labor intensive): its efficiency (i.e. labor productivity) has shown few gains in 50 years.

Meanwhile politicians (esp. state legislators) see higher ed as a ripe opportunity to cut costs. There is a supreme irony that the pressures are coming from the leftwing legislators in California and rightwing legislators in Texas — who rarely agree on anything — who now agree they want to spend less on higher ed so they can spend the savings on something else (that presumably buys more votes).

However, my suspicion (without any hard data) is that the marginal college students (without a lot of motivation or support network) will tend to fail in such an impersonal high-volume, low-touch setting. These are exactly the students that the California State University (the parent of SJSU) targets: every CSU faculty member can tell heartwarming stories about students who succeeded despite being the first in their family to attend college.

A few months ago, I met the executives of a Bay Area startup taking a different approach. Instead of a large-scale impersonal MOOCs, the approach of the Minerva Project is to cut costs by 2x (rather than 10x or 100x) but offer a high-touch online alternative to higher education. In other words, if everyone else is zigging — pursuing low-touch massively online solutions — they want to zag with high-touch smaller scale online courses.

The company landed $25m in Series A funding and numerous headlines about its plans to “be an online Ivy League university.” To be more Ivy League, it hired a 64-year-old former Harvard and Stanford administrator to be its founding dean.

The reason I met these execs was announced this morning:

Minerva Project and KGI Partner to Launch the Minerva Schools at KGI
San Francisco, Calif. – July 24, 2013 – Minerva Project, reinventing the university experience to develop global leaders and innovators across disciplines, and Keck Graduate Institute (KGI), a member of The Claremont University Consortium, today announced an innovative new partnership in higher education. KGI, an institution accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), is partnering with Minerva Project to launch the Minerva Schools at KGI, with the first class matriculating in the fall of 2015. The Minerva Schools’ unique undergraduate program will complement KGI’s current graduate-level offerings, expanding its portfolio and providing opportunities for student, faculty and administrative collaboration. The KGI-Minerva relationship and new programs are pending WASC approval.
…
The Minerva Schools, like KGI’s graduate programs, will help high-performing students become mature, confident individuals and put them on a path to meaningful careers and fulfilling lives. The highly selective undergraduate program will offer students from around the world the opportunity to learn from accomplished faculty versed in the latest teaching methodologies to ensure positive student learning outcomes.

“Minerva Project is pleased to have found in KGI a forward-thinking university partner whose philosophy and values align closely with our own,” said Ben Nelson, founder and CEO of Minerva Project. “As the most recent member of the pioneering Claremont University Consortium, KGI proved to be a major innovator in higher education when it created the first-of-its-kind professional science master’s degree in 1997. Today, more than 130 institutions have established nearly 300 such programs. By partnering with KGI, Minerva is following one of the established paths to accreditation as set forth by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges and strives to have a similar impact on higher education as a whole.”

It’s an interesting experiment — both because it tries to preserve some of the best things about higher education, and also because it’s so contrary to the conventional wisdom about online education.

It also seems consistent with the most insightful comment I’ve ever read about the future of online education, written last year by my friend (and co-author) Michael Mace in response to my blog posting:

universities bundle several services in that thing called a degree:
--Teaching the students
--Credentialing (ensuring that the students have learned the material)
--Giving the students social connections (Yale, Stanford)
--Helping young people turn into adults in a semi-safe setting

The MOOCs largely emphasize the first two points, and seem to be completely ignoring the value of the rest of the bundle. Meanwhile, Minerva promises to complete the bundle through a global cohort experience while saving money on buildings the way Amazon saves money on mall space.

As a college professor (and eventually a college parent), I believe the partial bundle is going to be less effective at preparing young adults for life — unless the missing pieces are provided another way — and also going to be less desirable for anyone who has a choice. Still, ala Clay Christensen, a disruptive innovation is one that appears inferior (but cheaper) at first and eventually displaces the higher quality solution.

I don’t have a financial stake in the success of Minerva, nor do any of my co-workers. Thus we can afford to be a bit more dispassionate than Nelson (and all the other entrepreneurs) attempting to remake the world of higher education. As with any disruptive innovation effort, it’s a high-risk, high-reward endeavor.

If I were 25, I would be terrified that my industry is heading the way of the landline, record store and the newspaper, but I’m expecting that the disruption will come slowly enough — and I’ll stay valuable long enough — to allow me to retire at the customary age.

Update 12:30 p.m: KGI has posted a press release from its perspective, and both EdSurge and GigaOM have articles on the news. Below is the publicity photo from the PR Newswire press release.

KGI president Sheldon Schuster and Minerva CEO Ben Nelson