Harvard Envy

Why Too Many Colleges Overshoot

Andrew S Rosen

• Publisher: Kaplan Test Prep
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781607148821
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Éducation commerciale

Harvard Envy is a chapter excerpt from Change.edu coming out October 18, 2011. Exploring the limitations of the exclusive, tradition-bound world of higher education, innovator Andrew S. Rosen, chairman and CEO of Kaplan, Inc., delivers a vision for making a world-class college experience available to students of all backgrounds. Little is known about John Harvard, who bequeathed his books and £779 to a fledgling college on the Charles River in the 1630s, but the institution that bears his name has become the gold standard for universities worldwide. Tracing this fascinating history, and the history of American higher education overall, "Harvard Envy" raises important questions about the effect of super-elite campuses on America's educational landscape. Just as Congress hotly debated whether to approve land-grant colleges in the nineteenth century, opening the doors of higher education to farmers, we face a competitive new demand for a highly educated workforce. Yet many colleges continue to insist on limiting access, and many college applicants continue to believe that exclusive institutions deliver the highest quality.With an eye-opening examination of the U.S. News and World Report college rankings and other barometers, "Harvard Envy" takes an enlightened look at how universities allocate resources and talent. Offering an inspiring alternative to the Ivory Tower playbook, Andrew S. Rosen presents a bold, cost-effective new vision for a truly competitive higher education system that serves both individual and national interests.

Harvard Envy

Why Too Many Colleges Overshoot

Harvard.

It’s the strongest and most celebrated brand name in higher education. Surely, then, it must have been named after an extraordinary man.

Well, not necessarily. In fact, only the barest details of John Harvard’s life are known. He was born in a London suburb in 1607, the son of a butcher, who died when John was thirteen. He had a half-dozen brothers and sisters, but in 1625 the plague killed his entire family except for his mother and one brother.¹ From 1627 to 1635, John studied at Cambridge, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees.² Within weeks of his college graduation, his mother died, too.

His family’s deaths played a vital role in this young man’s life. After his father died, John Harvard inherited £300 from his estate. His mother had quickly remarried a wealthy man, who died five months later, leaving her with sizable wealth. So upon her death in 1635, John inherited even more money—including a profitable saloon called the Queens Head Inn.³ In 1637, eager to flee the Old World that had brought so much sorrow, twenty-nine-year-old John Harvard and his new wife, Anne, sailed to New England. As cargo, they brought along John’s three-hundred-some-odd-volume library, which included Homer, Plutarch, and Bacon’s essays.⁴ Within months of landing, they bought land in Charlestown, Massachusetts. They began building a house, and John started preaching at a local church. But after just thirteen months in America, he died of consumption. He was thirty years old.

Harvard’s life would have been sad and entirely anonymous but for one decision: he left one half of his estate, and his entire library, to a new college that was taking root across the Charles River in Cambridge. During his life, John Harvard had little to do with the formation of the college: its founders were laying plans for its creation months before he left England, and it’s unclear if he had even visited the nascent institution, though according to one sketchy account, he may have once had dinner there.⁵ And it’s unclear exactly what happened to the £779 he bequeathed the school. According to one historian, half of it was likely squandered or embezzled by the headmaster.⁶ John Harvard’s books provided only a passing benefit, too: a 1764 fire wiped out most of the Harvard library, and just a single volume from his original bequest survives today.⁷

Nonetheless, the school’s founders decided to celebrate John Harvard’s modest largesse by naming their college after him. It was a surprising gesture—particularly since, unlike the founders of institutions such as Stanford or Cornell, Harvard’s namesake was uninvolved in its creation. In fact, when Harvard alumni decided to put up a memorial on the spot where John Harvard is buried, no one could figure out exactly where that was, since the death of the obscure minister had not been particularly noteworthy at the time. A student had to serve as a model for the statue of “John Harvard” (unveiled in 1884) that which now sits in Harvard Yard, as no images of John Harvard exist.

No one who knew John Harvard could possibly have predicted his lasting fame. And just as surely, no one involved in the early days of the tiny Massachusetts college to which his name is attached could have conceived the outsize importance that Harvard University would have on American higher education. It is a truly remarkable institution. There’s hardly any parent who wouldn’t be thrilled at the prospect of having a child attend and graduate from Harvard, nor hardly a professor or college administrator who wouldn’t love to be able to say that he or she was employed there. And while this idealization may be natural and deserved, the near-universal veneration of Harvard can be a harmful force—one that drives far too many colleges to emulate Harvard in ways that aren’t beneficial to the majority of students, or to the country.

The desire to imitate Harvard is nothing new. For much of American history, the small handful of colleges that existed were modeled on the pioneering New England institution, which was itself patterned on the great English universities. In fact, the defining visual elements of the traditional American college—the grass-covered “quad” and the Gothic buildings—are features mimicked directly from Cambridge and Oxford.⁸

In the early days, very few students were able to enjoy these bucolic settings: for centuries, American colleges attracted the tiniest sliver of the population. According to historian John Thelin, only nine colleges—Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Rutgers, William and Mary, and Yale—that survive today existed in the United States in 1781,⁹ nearly a century and a half after Harvard’s founding. (The number that existed in 1800 is just twenty-five.¹⁰) As best anyone can tell, roughly 1 percent of the colonial population attended college during this era (essentially all of them white Protestant men from privileged northeastern families), and many of them didn’t stay long. “One peculiar characteristic of colonial colleges in their first decades is that there was little emphasis on completing degrees,” Thelin writes. “Many students matriculated and then left college after a year or two, apparently with none of the stigma we now associate with ‘dropouts.’”¹¹

In these early years, there was only the loosest connection between going to college and the career one would pursue as an adult. Many people think these early colleges specialized in educating clergymen, and that’s true to some extent, but that perception is overblown: none of these schools had divinity programs or could ordain ministers, though half of a typical Harvard class would enter the ministry.¹² Nor were these early colleges educating doctors or lawyers. Well into the 1800s, these professions were learned via apprenticeship, and there was no requirement that aspirant physicians or barristers attend college.¹³ For many families, sending a child to college was as much about social position as it was about education. “A main purpose of the colleges was to identify and ratify a social elite,” Thelin writes. “The college was a conservative institution that was essential to transmitting a relatively fixed social order.”¹⁴ In fact, for many years, the names of the men—and until the mid-1800s, they were almost always men¹⁵—being granted degrees at Harvard’s commencement ceremony weren’t read off alphabetically; they were recited in the order of the graduates’ social rank.¹⁶

By the 1800s, however, the number of colleges began to grow quickly. And as the higher education market expanded and matured, a pecking order emerged, as it does in most markets over time. Colleges such as Harvard and Yale remained at the pinnacle of the evolving higher education landscape. And as newer, less pedigreed colleges entered the scene, many of them focused considerable energy and resources on trying to move up this food chain, to be more like their elite, up-market competitors.

THIS EVER-UPWARD PHENOMENON has become familiar to people who watch the evolution of business, thanks largely to the work of Clayton Christensen. Christensen is a former Rhodes Scholar from Utah who spent the 1980s as a manager at an industrial ceramics company. In 1989, nearing age forty and with five children, he took the highly unusual move of chucking his managerial career to pursue a doctorate in business administration. “It was very risky,” he recalls, but jumping into academia in midlife had its advantages. “I had a lot of questions that were relevant to the world that managers live in.”¹⁷

While working on his degree at Harvard Business School, Christensen began studying the history of industries such as disc drives and earth excavators. In doing so, he continually found examples of established players being challenged by upstarts whose new products, in contrast to the accepted competitive strategies, were worse than existing goods on the market. By 1997 he was explaining his theory—which he called “disruptive innovation”—in a book called The Innovator’s Dilemma, which would go on to sell five hundred thousand copies.¹⁸

In the book, Christensen explains how most companies focus too much energy on “sustaining innovations,” that is, adding new and improved features to existing products. Eventually these companies “overshoot” their customers’ needs, delivering overly complicated products that have too many unnecessary bells and whistles and cost too much.

In contrast, Christensen identified a new breed of competitors that thrived by focusing their development efforts o...