Are colleges trying too hard to be Harvard?

A while back I ran a piece about how Education Sector Policy Director Kevin Carey took a swing at Winona State University in “The Dangerous Lure of the University Research Model,” saying that too many regional universities such as Winona State are sacrificing their core mission by aping research universities.

Now Harvard's Clayton Christensen and BYU-Idaho's Henry Eyring write on CNN: "Colleges should stop imitating Harvard."

Their take on colleges and universities:

The problem is that too many of them, including former community colleges and technical institutes, now act more like Harvard, the world's most widely admired university.

Imitating Harvard is a problem for two reasons.

One is the cost: If you don't have a multibillion-dollar endowment and government research funding, the only alternative is to raise tuition.

The other problem is that the basic elements of the Harvard model of education are roughly 100 years old. Thus, its imitators have, with the best of intentions, become expensive, exclusive and distanced from the nonacademic world.

Read the full article here.

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