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Washington Post Change.org emerges as influential advocate on issues from bullying to bank fees By Ylan Q. Mui, Published: January 23 Ben Rattray knows that revolution does not always happen spontaneously. The 31-year-old entrepreneur rattles off a list of populist actions over the past year: the consumer revolts against Bank of America's and Verizon's unpopular fees, a drive to enlist the San Francisco Giants to speak out against anti-gay bullying, a petition forcing the South African government to address the rape of lesbians. Each campaign won thousands of supporters, inflamed public opinion, and drew the ire of corporate executives and political leaders. But these were not impromptu rebellions that chanced upon success. They were carefully nurtured by Rattray's fledgling company, a social media site called Change.org that has emerged as one of the most influential channels for activism in the country. "We're in the business of amplifying," Rattray said in an interview. "We're trying to change the balance of power between individuals and large organizations." Rattray said his firm is profitable and hopes to bring in tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue within a few years. It makes money by running campaigns for advocacy groups such as Amnesty International in exchange for a fee. Ordinary users can create an online petition for free. The company, which has headquarters in the District and in San Francisco, has exploded over the past year, growing from a staff of 20 to about 100, with offices around the world. Though originally conceived as a nonprofit, Change.org is now part of an emerging group of "social benefit corporations," such as Patagonia, that seek to both make money and do good. Fueling Change.org's rise is the wave of global unrest that has given birth to other viral movements such as Occupy Wall Street. But Rattray calls these movements "radically under- optimized." They have no leaders and no coordinated mi

"Ready for Change.edu? January 11, 2012 - 3:00am By Paul Fain Andrew S. Rosen takes the long view when talking about higher education. As CEO of Kaplan, Inc., he often defends the role of for-profit colleges in an evolving marketplace, peppering versions of his stump speech with tales about the creation of public universities and community colleges. His point is that some skepticism about for-profits is similar to the snobbery those older sectors faced from elite private higher education. Rosen goes further in his debut book, Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy, which attempts to paint a picture of higher education's future as well as its history. He also takes a turn as a journalist of sorts - an interesting twist for the former general counsel of the Washington Post Co. - writing about his campus visits to other institutions, a couple of which are Kaplan competitors. The book is ambitious in its scope, particularly for an author with obvious vested interests. But most reviewers have given Rosen high marks. Kirkus Reviews writes: "Incredibly, his argument never comes off as self-serving; the author's thorough exploration of 'Harvard Envy' and the rise of 'resort' campuses is both fascinating and enlightening." Rosen recently answered questions over e-mail about his book, which was released by Kaplan Publishing. Q: The book arrives amid a series of challenges for your industry. What did you hope to accomplish by writing it? A: I've spent most of my life studying or working in education, with students of all ages and preparation levels: top students from America's most elite institutions and working adults and low-income students who have few quality choices to change their lives. I've come to see how the American higher education system (as with K-12) is profoundly tilted in favor of those who already have advantages. Our society keeps investing more and more in the relatively small and unchanging number of students who have the privil

"December 31, 2011 Let's Improve Learning. OK, but How? By W. Robert Connor Does American higher education have a systematic way of thinking about how to improve student learning? It would certainly be useful, especially at a time when budgets are tight and the pressure is on to demonstrate better results. Oh, there's plenty of discussion-bright ideas, old certainties, and new approaches-and a rich discourse about innovation, reinvention, and transformation. But the most powerful ideas about improving learning are often unspoken. Amid all the talk about change, old assumptions exert their continuing grasp. For example, most of us assume that expanding the number of fields and specialties in the curriculum (and of faculty to teach them), providing more small classes, and lowering teaching loads (and, hence, lowering student-faculty ratios) are inherently good things. But while many of those ideas are plausible, few have been rigorously evaluated. So maybe it's time to stop relying on assumptions about improving learning and start finding out what really works best. A genuine theory of change, as such a systematic evaluation of effectiveness is sometimes called, would be grounded in knowledge about how students learn, and in the best way to put that knowledge to work. The theory should also be educationally robust; that is, it should not just help colleges expose students to certain subject matter, but also challenge institutions to help students develop the long-lasting survival skills needed in a time of radical and often unpredictable change. And it must also have its feet on the ground, with a sure footing in financial realities. Above all, those who would develop a truly systematic way of thinking about and creating change must be able to articulate their purpose. Given the great diversity of institutional types, student demographics, history, and mission among American colleges and universities, it's hard to discern a shared sense of purpose. But when f

"September 14, 2010 Colleges May Be Missing a Chance for Change By Karin Fischer Speakers at an international conference here delivered a scathing assessment of higher education: Universities, they said, are slow to change, uncomfortable in dealing with real-world problems, and culturally resistant to substantive internationalization. Despite the global economic crisis, "large parts of the education sector have probably missed the opportunity for real change," Soumitra Dutta, a professor of business and technology at Insead, a French business school, told the audience at a meeting of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, "Higher Education in a World Changed Utterly: Doing More With Less." The gathering drew about 500 government officials, institutional leaders, and researchers, Mr. Dutta, who is also academic director of elab@INSEAD, a center for excellence in teaching and research in the digital economy, evoked the analogy of a frog: Place it in a pot of boiling water, and it will immediately jump out. Put the frog in cool water and slowly raise the temperature-it won't react to change and will be cooked to death. Even with a "dose of hot water" caused by the recession, Mr. Dutta said, most universities have tinkered at the margins, freezing faculty recruitment and reducing administrative expenses, rather than taking a hard look at how they do business. "Have we really jumped, have we really changed?" he said. "I look around, and I see honestly very little change." To meet growing and diversifying worldwide demand for higher education, Mr. Dutta and his fellow panelists said, colleges must embrace new models, transforming how they deliver education. For one, they argued, both education and research must become more relevant and responsive to society."

"January 23, 2012 Invisible Gorillas Are Everywhere By William Pannapacker By now most everyone has heard about an experiment that goes something like this: Students dressed in black or white bounce a ball back and forth, and observers are asked to keep track of the bounces to team members in white shirts. While that's happening, another student dressed in a gorilla suit wanders into their midst, looks around, thumps his chest, then walks off, apparently unseen by most observers because they were so focused on the bouncing ball. Voilà: attention blindness. The invisible-gorilla experiment is featured in Cathy Davidson's new book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn (Viking, 2011). Davidson is a founder of a nearly 7,000-member organization called Hastac, or the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, that was started in 2002 to promote the use of digital technology in academe. It is closely affiliated with the digital humanities and reflects that movement's emphasis on collaboration among academics, technologists, publishers, and librarians. Last month I attended Hastac's fifth conference, held at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Davidson's keynote lecture emphasized that many of our educational practices are not supported by what we know about human cognition. At one point, she asked members of the audience to answer a question: "What three things do students need to know in this century?" Without further prompting, everyone started writing down answers, as if taking a test. While we listed familiar concepts such as "information literacy" and "creativity," no one questioned the process of working silently and alone. And noticing that invisible gorilla was the real point of the exercise. Most of us are, presumably, the products of compulsory educational practices that were developed during the Industrial Revolution. And the way most of us teach is a relic of the s

The Chronicle of Higher Education Friday, January 7, 2011 January 6, 2011 When Leading a College in Tough Times, Getting Faculty Support Is Crucial By Scott Carlson Palm Springs, Calif. A session here at the Council of Independent Colleges' conference for presidents opened with the sort of joke that goes over well in a room full of top administrators: "How many faculty members does it take to change a light bulb?" The punchline: "Change?" But, seriously, many of the colleges represented here are facing challenges that may require some major and even drastic changes. Faculty members, with their reputations for recalcitrance, are often seen as barriers to change. In the session, a scholar of higher education from Harvard University discussed the traits and motivations of the latest generation of faculty members, while two presidents talked about ways they had worked with faculty members to steer their colleges through crises. Cathy A. Trower, research director for the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at Harvard, argued that the oldest professors-those born as late as 1945, who are called "traditionalists"-have attitudes about their careers that are very different from the youngest academics', like the Millennials'. Traditionalists tend to be loyal to employers, for example, while Gen-Xers are skeptical. Baby boomers are seeking titles and recognition for their work, while Millennial employees are primarily interested in meaningful work. Ms. Trower said that new scholars primarily want the same things that older scholars want, but the world around all of them has changed, with new methods for distributing scholarly work (for example, digitally), longer work hours, a decline among scholarly presses and longer lead times for publication, and greater financial pressures on scholarly work and departments."

"The Disruption Is Here September 15, 2011 - 3:00am Michael Staton A recent essay here by Robert Archibald and David Feldman challenged the idea of a "higher education bubble." They argued that a degree, even an expensive degree, is still worth it. They correctly pointed out that a degree is not an asset that responds to supply and demand like other markets. Their point that "on average most of us are average, and the data show that college is a very good investment for the average person," is true enough. But their real message was: there's no need to panic, the status quo is still working. I disagree. Said essay is part of a broader continuing discussion, this round set off by Peter Thiel's statements surrounding his 20 Under 20 Program encouraging students to "stop out" of college - with the idea that they are more likely to achieve entrepreneurial breakthroughs on their own than with more formal education. Thiel is a managing partner at one of the venture investors, Founders Fund, in my company, Inigral. Ironically, Inigral serves educational institutions with our Schools App, and most of our clients are traditional colleges and universities. (Schools App is a community platform inside Facebook and on mobile devices that helps to welcome the incoming class during the admissions, orientation, and first-year experience, making sure students find their "fit" and get off on the right foot.) So my company helps keep students in college while Thiel is going around talking about the potential value of "stopping out." Given this irony, people often ask me what I think about Thiel's comments suggesting that higher education is in a bubble. Here's what I think: He is mostly right, but the future prospects for education are more optimistic than Thiel suggests for two primary reasons: 1) Though it looks like an economic bubble, it's unlikely that there will be a precise moment in which the market crashes. Instead, there will be a slow market shift towards amor

"Constant Curricular Change November 8, 2010 Faculty members routinely change their courses from semester to semester, experimenting with both minor changes and major innovations, according to a national survey released Saturday by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. But while professors see curricular innovation as part of their jobs, they remain uncertain about whether pedagogical efforts are appropriately rewarded, the study found. The survey -- of faculty members at all ranks at 20 four-year colleges and universities, including both public and private institutions -- found that 86.6 percent make some revision to courses at least once a year. Revisions could be relatively minor, with changes in the syllabus, readings or assignments qualifying. But about 37 percent reported adopting a significant new pedagogy in at least one of their courses at least once a year -- with new pedagogies being defined as such approaches as experiential learning, service learning and learning communities."

"A Final Word on the Presidents' Student-Learning Alliance November 22, 2010, 1:36 pm By David Glenn Last week we published a series of comments (one, two, three) on the Presidents' Alliance for Excellence in Student Learning and Accountability. Today we're pleased to present a reply from David C. Paris, executive director of the presidential alliance's parent organization, the New Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability: I was very pleased to see the responses to the announcement of the Presidents' Alliance as generally welcoming ("commendable," "laudatory initiative," "applaud") the shared commitment of these 71 founding institutions to do more-and do it publicly and cooperatively-with regard to gathering, reporting, and using evidence of student learning. The set of comments is a fairly representative sample of positions on the issues of evidence, assessment, and accountability. We all agree that higher education needs to do more to develop evidence of student learning, to use it to measure and improve our work, and to be far more transparent and accountable in reporting the results. The comments suggest different approaches-and these differences are more complementary than contradictory-to where we should focus our efforts and how change will occur. I'd suggest that none of us has the answer, and while each of these approaches faces obstacles, each can contribute to progress in this work. For William Chace, Cliff Adelman, and Michael Poliakoff, the focus should be on some overarching measures or concepts that will clearly tell us, our students, and the public how well we are doing. Obtaining agreement on a "scale and index," or the appropriate "active verbs" describing competence, or dashboards and other common reporting mechanisms will drive change by establishing a common framework for evaluation. Josipa Roksa, on the other hand, suggests that real change will only happen from the ground up. Facu

"January 22, 2012 States Push Even Further to Cut Spending on Colleges By Eric Kelderman For nearly four years, governors and state legislators have focused on little else in higher education but cutting budgets to deal with historic gaps in revenue. Now, with higher-education support at a 25-year low, lawmakers are considering some policy changes that have been off-limits in the past, such as consolidating campuses and eliminating governing boards. Such proposals reflect the reality that, in most states, money for higher education will be constrained for the foreseeable future. Systems in Georgia and New York have already taken the unusual step of combining campuses under a single president. Other states, such as Ohio, are talking about giving institutions more freedom from state regulations, although for college administrators there's a trade-off: They would get more flexibility but even less state money. On the agenda in many statehouses this year will be bills that would tie higher-education appropriations to the completion rates of students at public colleges. Such performance-based models, which have had a mixed record in recent decades, are again popular with lawmakers trying to squeeze the most out of every tax dollar and to reward colleges that are more efficient at producing graduates. Related Content State Support For Higher Education Falls 7.6% in 2012 Fiscal Year Calif. Governor Goes After For-Profits With Limits on Cal Grants Legislators aren't demanding that colleges be more cost-efficient just to reduce spending on higher education, says Travis J. Reindl, a higher-education researcher for the bipartisan National Governors Association. They also want to keep colleges affordable for students. "We'll still be talking about money, money, money," Mr. Reindl says of the legislative sessions ahead. "Governors are increasingly interested in how the money is being spent by higher education ... and how much of that money is going to come out of

"January 31, 2012 'Change.edu' and the Problem With For-Profits 'Change.edu' and the Problem With For-Profits 1 Kaplan Andrew S. Rosen, chief executive of Kaplan and author of a new book on for-profit colleges Enlarge Image By Robert M. Shireman It is clear that Andrew Rosen, the chief executive of Kaplan, wants to leave readers of Change.edu with the idea that for-profit colleges are innovative, efficient, and effective in serving people left out by traditional higher education, and that their bad reputation is the result of unfair attacks. I picked up Rosen's book wanting to see how the power of the market can transform the enterprise and improve student learning. Instead, I am now more concerned about the hazards of for-profit colleges than I was before. The eye-opening, gasp-inducing elements involve Rosen's descriptions of the intense pressures on company executives to produce quick, huge profits for investors by shortchanging students. "An investor who wants to make a quick hit can, at least theoretically, buy an institution, rev up the recruitment engine, reduce investment in educational outcomes," and deliver "a dramatic return on investment." The nefarious temptation is not just theoretical, though, and Rosen says so when he introduces the case of abuses by the Career Education Corporation. "There will always be some leaders who choose to manage for the short term ... particularly when they hold the highly liquid equity stakes that the leadership of private-sector institutions sometimes receive as part of their compensation. This isn't a theoretical issue; it has happened." The word "always" concerns me. Always as in: This can't be fixed? And how many are the "some" who would eagerly dismiss student needs in the pursuit of a rapid, profitable expansion? I would have liked to hear that the contrasting example to CEC is the for-profit college where the investors are committed to the long term and never bring up the idea of a get-rich-quick scheme tha

"Systemic Changes in Higher Education * Articles Abstract: A power shift is occurring in higher education, driven by two trends: (a) the increased freedom of learners to access, create, and re-create content; and (b) the opportunity for learners to interact with each other outside of a mediating agent. Information access and dialogue, previously under control of the educator, can now be readily fulfilled by learners. When the essential mandate of universities is buffeted by global, social/political, technological, and educational change pressures, questions about the future of universities become prominent. The integrated university faces numerous challenges, including a decoupling of research and teaching functions. Do we still need physical classrooms? Are courses effective when information is fluid across disciplines and subject to continual changes? What value does a university provide society when educational resources and processes are open and transparent?"

Breaking Bad Habits: Navigating the Financial Crisis by Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman The "Great Recession" of 2009 has brought an unprecedented level of financial chaos to public higher education in America. Programs are being reduced, furloughs and layoffs are widespread, class sizes are increasing, sections are being cut, and students can't get into classes needed for graduation. Enrollment losses upwards of several hundred thousand are being reported-and only time will tell whether the situation is even worse. Reports of budget cuts in public institutions in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 percent (Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, Florida, and California) are becoming common. Halfway through the 2009-2010 fiscal year, 48 states were projecting deficits for 2011 and 2012 (NASBO, 2009). Although states are reluctant to raise taxes, they evidently have less of a problem letting tuitions go up. And up they are going-California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Wisconsin, and Florida announced increases ranging from 10 to 33 percent. The normally tuition-resistant Florida legislature has authorized annual increases in undergraduate tuitions of 15 percent per year until they reach national averages for public four-year institutions. Around the country, the increases are setting off student protests reminiscent of the 1960's, variously directed at campuses, system boards, legislatures, and governors-complete with reports of violence and arrests. The New Normal Higher education has been through tough times before. The pattern of the last two decades has been a zigzag of reductions in state funds for higher education during times of recession, followed by a return to revenue growth about two years after the state coffers refill. But resources have not returned to pre-recession levels. So the overall pattern has been a modest but continuous decline in state revenues. Caption: Percent Change in Appropriations for Higher Education, 1960-2006

"Has the Conversation Changed? August 9, 2010 WASHINGTON -- Leaders in for-profit higher education have historically tried to deflect criticism of the institutions by pointing to a few misbehaving "bad actors" who aggressively recruit unqualified students, keep them enrolled for as long as possible while burying them in debt and, if students stick it out long enough, award them worthless degrees. But the events of last week -- most notably the findings of the Government Accountability Office's undercover investigation of recruiting at for-profit colleges that included inducements to commit fraud at four institutions, and the highly critical Senate hearing at which the findings were aired -- challenged the validity of that argument and put advocates of the sector on the defensive in a way that they have not been for years. The developments emboldened critics, saying that the week's events prove what they've been saying about the systemic nature of the sector's problems. And the developments prompted a perceptible, if subtle, shift in the rhetoric of for-profit college leaders and a set of self-imposed actions that, while derided by skeptics as little more than damage control, reflected a recognition by the institutions that their previous protestations may no longer suffice. "It's not us, it's them, so don't penalize the whole sector" has become "it's us, but it's not really that bad, and we're trying to fix it -- so don't use a heavy hand in regulating or legislating against us." Based on the tack taken by Congressional Democrats in recent weeks, following on the Obama administration's aggressive regulatory approach this winter and spring, many observers seem to think that wish may be wishful thinking at this point. With the GAO's findings suggesting that evidence of for-profit recruiters encouraging students to commit fraud was fairly widespread and that questionable or misleading practices were identified at all 15 for-profit colleges that investigators visite

"'A World Changed Utterly' September 14, 2010 PARIS -- "We must identify ways to achieve higher quality and better outcomes at a time of increased demand and declining resources." Statements like that will sound familiar to anyone who has spent more than a half hour at virtually any higher education meeting in the United States since 2008 (or, failing that, who has read Inside Higher Ed's coverage of such meetings), as the global recession stifled if not strangled many state economies, and by extension the country's. While the statement above could have been uttered by just about any of the American higher education leaders who are attending the general conference here this week of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Institutional Management in Higher Education program, it wasn't. It came from Richard Yelland, who heads OECD's Education Management and Infrastructure Division, and is the convener of the meeting. He was describing the conference's theme, "Higher Education in a World Changed Utterly: Doing More with Less," by which the organization is referring both to what Yelland called the "most synchronized recession in OECD countries in over half a century" and trends -- such as government pushes to expand access to higher education and dramatically changing technological capabilities -- that the historic downturn is in many cases exacerbating. "

"ST. PAUL, MINN. -- Pockets of experimentation and potential change are cropping up all over the place in higher education. Here, it's the OpenCourseWare movement. There, colleges are adopting "just in time" remediation. And over here, some states are changing funding formulas to reward institutions for graduating students rather than merely enrolling them. But what do the individual innovations amount to? Do they point the way to the sort of transformative change that, given the likelihood of constrained budgets going forward, is probably necessary if higher education is to not only sustain the current level of postsecondary attainment in the country, but increase it in the way many policy experts believe is needed? Share This Story * Bookmark and Share * E-mail * Print Related Stories * Community Colleges' Unfunded Mandate May 17, 2010 * The Accountability/Improvement Paradox April 30, 2010 * Looking Before They Leap April 27, 2010 * Retention, From Beginning to End April 26, 2010 * What the Pledge Means April 21, 2010 FREE Daily News Alerts Advertisement Even longtime advocates of higher education appear to be coming around to the conclusion that the status quo won't suffice. But acknowledging that fact is a far cry from identifying a framework that might lead to such a transformed future. It was in recognition of the latter goal that an unusually diverse group of college administrators and professors, higher education analysts, state officials, and others gathered here last week to talk about how to use data to provoke change and improve performance in higher education"

"April 3, 2011 A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part 2 By Thomas H. Benton What is keeping undergraduates from learning? Last month, I speculated from my perspective as a college teacher about a set of interlocking factors that have contributed to the problem. In that column (The Chronicle, February 25), I referred to the alarming data presented by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011) in the context of President Obama's call for more students to attend college in order to prepare for the economy of the future. Why, I asked, should we send more students to college-at an ever greater cost-when more than a third of them, according to Arum and Roksa, demonstrate "no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills" after four years of education? This month I want to speculate on why students (and, to a lesser extent, their parents) are not making choices that support educational success. What could they possibly be thinking? The student as consumer. Surely adolescent expectations of Animal House debaucheries have been with us since the decline of college as preparation for the ministry. But, in the past few generations, the imagery and rhetoric of academic marketing have cultivated a belief that college will be, if not decadent, at least primarily recreational: social activities, sporting events, and travel. Along the way, there may be some elective cultural enrichment and surely some preprofessional training and internships, the result of which will be access to middle-class careers. College brochures and Web sites may mention academic rankings, but students probably won't read anything about expectations of rigor and hard work: On the contrary, "world-renowned professors" will provide you with a "world-class education." Increasingly, students are buying an "experience" instead of earning an education, and, in the competition to attract cu

The Chronicle of Higher Education February 19, 2012 How 'Flipping' the Classroom Can Improve the Traditional Lecture By Dan Berrett Andrew P. Martin loves it when his lectures break out in chaos. It happens frequently, when he asks the 80 students in his evolutionary-biology class at the University of Colorado at Boulder to work in small groups to solve a problem, or when he asks them to persuade one another that the answer they arrived at before class is correct. When they start working together, his students rarely stay in their seats, which are bolted to the floor. Instead they gather in the hallway or in the aisles, or spill toward the front of the room, where the professor typically stands. Mr. Martin, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, drops in on the discussions, asking and answering questions, and hearing where students are stumped. "Students are effectively educating each other," he says of the din that overtakes his room. "It means they're in control, and not me." Enlarge Image How 'Flipping' the Classroom Can Improve the Traditional Lecture 2 Benjamin Rasmussen for The Chronicle Students discuss the relationship between finches' beak sizes and survival rates during Andrew Martin's evolutionary-biology class at the U. of Colorado at Boulder. Such moments of chaos are embraced by advocates of a teaching technique called "flipping." As its name suggests, flipping describes the inversion of expectations in the traditional college lecture. It takes many forms, including interactive engagement, just-in-time teaching (in which students respond to Web-based questions before class, and the professor uses this feedback to inform his or her teaching), and peer instruction. But the techniques all share the same underlying imperative: Students cannot passively receive material in class, which is one reason some students dislike flipping. Instead they gather the information largely outside of class, by reading, watching recorded lectures, or list

"Is Higher Ed Ready to Change? November 17, 2010 INDIANAPOLIS -- One's perception of how widely colleges and universities have embraced the necessity and inevitability of fundamental transformative change -- in how the institutions educate students, how they finance themselves, etc. -- is likely to depend on which sorts of higher education conferences he or she attends. Meetings like the higher education productivity conference sponsored here this week by the Lumina Foundation for Education are filled with true believers -- state legislators and governors' aides staring at massive budget deficits, higher education system officials charged with increasing the number of graduates their institutions produce, and the legions of policy analysts and foundation officials who beat the drum about college completion and efficiency. Far more skepticism is in evidence at conferences held by faculty groups, where professors are increasingly distressed by the (non-collaborative, they say) ways in which their institutions are going about making hard budget decisions, such as cutting academic programs or personnel benefits."

For a second there, I thought you were at the ASHE conference George...

"Disruption, Delivery and Degrees February 9, 2011 WASHINGTON -- Many college professors and administrators shudder at comparisons between what they do and what, say, computer or automobile makers do. (And just watch how they bristle if you dare call higher education an "industry.") But in a new report, the man who examined how technology has "disrupted" and reshaped those and other manufacturing industries has turned his gaze to higher education, arguing that it faces peril if it does not change to meet the challenge. The report, "Disrupting College," was also the subject of a panel discussion Tuesday at the Center for American Progress, which released the report along with the Innosight Institute. (A video recording of the event is available here.) Clayton M. Christensen, the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, coined the term "disruptive innovation" in a series of books (among them The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution) that examined how technological changes altered existing markets for key products and services, usually by lowering prices or making them available to a different (and usually broader) audience. While Christensen's early work focused on manufacturing industries and commercial services like restaurants, he and his colleagues, in their more recent studies, have turned to key social enterprises such as K-12 education and health care. America's constellation of higher education institutions is ripe for such an analysis, Michael B. Horn, executive director of education at the Innosight Institute and a co-author of the report, said during Tuesday's event. (In addition to Christensen and Horn, the other authors are Louis Soares of the Center for American Progress and Louis Caldera of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation.) Traditional institutions have "done so much for our country for so many decades and have played such an illustrious part in the country's success," said Horn. And while th