FORWARD
Twenty-one years ago, I started on a journey of writing about colleges and universities as a young reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education. I never set out to be a “higher-education writer,” nor did I ever think in 1997 that I’d still be writing about the topic to this day. But what I discovered in those first few years at the Chronicle is that higher education is the gateway to the American dream, and that as a result, colleges and universities are critical not only to education, but to the economy, to citizenship, and to society.
Yet we all know too well the flaws of that higher-education system: too few students are graduating from college, too many are leaving with too much debt, and there is a growing economic divide among the haves and have nots, with both students and institutions. In the last few years, the focus of my research and writing has centered almost exclusively on how we can improve the higher education system through innovative practices and approaches to build a future that is going to look much different than the recent past.
I have traveled the country spending time with students, faculty members, and administrators on campuses of all kinds and sizes to figure out what makes institutions tick, who drives innovation, and what the barriers to change are. What I found is that while new ideas to transform teaching, financial aid, and student services often bubble up from experiments in the trenches, it is institutional leaders that encourage innovation by setting the tone, crafting the narrative for internal and external constituencies, and finding the money to expand boutique projects.
As the pages that follow in this book will outline, I have found that transformation isn’t a formula from a box that can be easily replicated from campus to campus. A change of mindset is needed at the top if leaders are to embrace innovation to create institutions focused on their students’ future. In the decades ahead, it is my belief that prestige in higher education will be measured by those institutions that focus on expanding access to the neediest students, improve completion of all students, and help graduates find their passions in life.
The future of work, indeed the future of our country, depends on our higher-education system thinking differently about how to prepare the next generation of talent. It will require leaders who ask the right questions, who are willing to experiment (and fail), and who are prepared to attempt new approaches to problem solving. This book provides an excellent starting point for leaders in higher education as they begin on that journey.
Jeffrey J. Selingo
Author, Columnist, and Founding Director of the Arizona
State/Georgetown University Academy for Innovative Higher
Education Leadership