Is Higher Education an 'Industry' That is Evolving?

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Paul Kim examines some of the implications of looking at higher education as an industry and whether or not, as an industry, it is under external pressures to evolve:

In 1859, Charles Darwin proposed in The Origin of Species that living organisms adapt and evolve through natural selection (survival of the fittest). In the same vein, Charles Fine claimed that when industries face new challenges or environmental pressure, they must evolve or adapt in order to avoid extinction.1 In addition, scholars such as Takahiro Fujimoto2 viewed competency-building competition as part of industry’s evolutionary process, while Ki-Chan Kim and Hi Sook Kim3 viewed “feed forwarding” as an important survival and growth instinct in industry evolution. Although some in higher education might consider such ideas nonsensical when applied to colleges and universities, we can adapt some of these views in trying to make sense of today’s higher education ecosystem.

Listed as key takeways from this article in EDUCAUSE Quarterly:

• To survive and thrive, living organisms, industries, and institutions — including higher education — must evolve or adapt to changing environments.
• The slow evolutionary clock speed and failure to adopt contextualized open interfaces in the higher education ecosystem may threaten its continued survival in the face of new environmental pressures.
• More effective and efficient knowledge creation and distribution can increase the evolutionary clock speed and fuel successful evolutionary changes.
• The higher education ecosystem has produced some projects demonstrating an evolutionary shift in approach that could fuel further successful evolution.

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