What Macalester's president learned from Steve Jobs' biography

Macalester College President Brian Rosenberg explains in The Huffington Post one of three lessons that higher education needs to take from the life of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs:

One of higher education's great weaknesses is the inability to decide what not to do. We see this played out in many ways: on a curricular level, where the proliferation of programs without the proliferation of resources makes it very difficult to maintain high quality across the board; on an institutional level, particularly at research universities, where the attempt simultaneously to educate undergraduates and graduate students, to run a hospital and a law school, and to field semi-professional football and basketball teams creates entities that are sprawling, disconnected, and poorly focused. We see it within consortia of colleges, where redundancies are created because it is easier to avoid deciding what not to do than to increase educational efficiency through shared programming.

Read about the other two in his essay here.

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