Jeff Brown on democratizing higher education

What this conversation is about

Jeff Brown was dean of the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois when he spoke with Glenn Llopis. He is a professor of finance, he founded a center on business and public policy, and he led the launch of the college’s online MBA. He had also published a position paper arguing that higher education has to be transformed rather than tuned, which is what Glenn wanted to talk about.

His own definition of the purpose starts classically: education makes us more rational, more thoughtful, better informed, and the benefit belongs to society as much as to the person receiving it. What has changed is that the pace of technological change has turned it from a luxury for a narrow segment into something closer to a necessity, and that there is now a role for both a traditional education and skills-based learning available to people whenever they need it.

A morning that set the priorities

Glenn asked about September 11, 2001. Brown was then a senior economist with the Council of Economic Advisers, arriving later than usual, listening to the radio reports from New York. Walking in through a gate at the White House, he heard the Secret Service call out that a plane was inbound with an estimated ninety seconds. He froze, then ran into the executive office building to warn colleagues. The plane hit the Pentagon, which he drove past on the way home after the building was evacuated.

"it makes you want to really appreciate life and not waste time. And to really make, try to make a positive difference in the world" — Jeff Brown · 00:02:56

What he remembers about the weeks that followed is how people behaved: letting each other into traffic, waving, kind to strangers. He wishes that were recoverable, and he draws a working conclusion from it.

"as a leader in higher ed, you know, I view my role as being one that is about bringing people together and creating opportunities for folks rather than trying to divide us" — Jeff Brown · 00:04:00

Not wrong. Slow.

Asked where higher education went wrong, Brown declined the premise. Universities appear on any list of the oldest institutions in the world because they meet a real need: creating, spreading and preserving knowledge across generations. The problem is that they were designed when knowledge changed slowly. What was taught in the 1690s was not very different from what was taught sixty years earlier.

"six years, six individual years is enough for people's education to no longer be cutting edge and up to date" — Jeff Brown · 00:08:09

His own college is his example: the analytics and data work now at the core of the curriculum was not taught as a core discipline a few years before the recording, which means graduates from those years never met it. He defends how the decisions get made, since shared governance produces wise and thoughtful ones. What it does not produce is quick ones, and quickness is what the moment asks for.

Scale that individualizes

His prescription sounds like the opposite of personalization until he explains it. Cost has put education out of reach for many families, and the model that grew up around geography leaves whole regions and countries without access to top scholars. Technology, used deliberately, lets an institution reach far more people and treat them more individually at the same time.

"when you're operating at this scale and with technology, you can actually reach more people and do a better job of individualizing it." — Jeff Brown · 00:11:37

The piece he most wants gone is the assumption, roughly eight centuries old, that the only credential worth having is a degree. Certificates and badges let someone learn the finance or the analytics they need right now, at the level they need, with something to show for it.

"And so I can individualize my educational needs to where I am in my life, where I am in my career. And it becomes much less of a one size fits all, come to campus, spend two years, take these courses." — Jeff Brown · 00:12:34

"we've essentially demolished all of those barriers, by, through intentional design of our program" — Jeff Brown · 00:18:15

Lead, follow fast, or become irrelevant

Asked what he would tell his peers, Brown gave the three options at the top of this page, and said the institution that will not try these approaches risks becoming the cassette tape of education. The pandemic at least got many of them to put a toe in the water.

His caution is about how they did it. Taking what you did in a classroom and pointing a camera at it is not online teaching, and he says the schools that tried it that way did not succeed. The content and the delivery have to be broken down and rebuilt for the medium. His analogy is the invention of the motion picture: what created an industry was not filming a stage play from the back of the theatre but developing a form that played to the strengths of the new medium.

He is also careful not to oversell the degree. Plenty of good careers do not require one, and that is fine; it does not mean those people could not use some of what a university knows. The tradespeople he describes end up running their own businesses, and nobody taught them accounting or profit while they were learning the trade.

"this is perhaps why higher education got stuck in standardization because we thought that that was the only way to learn" — Glenn Llopis · 00:23:53