Embrace Disruption in Higher Education: Gavin Newsom

SAN FRANCISCO – Gavin Newsom’s staff didn’t want him to give this talk.

How would it look, they feared, if California’s lieutenant governor – someone who sits on the boards of the University of California and California State University systems – appeared on stage with the CEO of a controversial start-up working to upend college education?

He did it anyway.

“This is code red,” Newsom said at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference this week, speaking in no uncertain terms about how he feels about the state of higher education. “We have to do something dramatic.”

What exactly that means, of course, is still anyone’s guess. But Newsom agreed to debate it with Sebastian Thrun, the co-founder of Udacity, a company that creates online college courses focused largely on science and technology.

The future of college is the topic du jour in this back-to-school season. Amid fears of rising tuition costs and declining state funding is the concern that colleges are simply not preparing students well enough for the working world.

Newsom said institutions had to change their approach to meet the needs of companies like Google, Twitter, Salesforce.com and others – or risk becoming irrelevant.

"It reminds me a bit of Kodak," Newsom said on stage. "You have to wake up before the world that you've created is competing against you."

Thrun went even further, saying that colleges had graduated far too many liberal arts majors and not enough with computer science degrees or programming skills. “Very few of the companies are saying we need more psychologists or English majors,” Thrun said. “They’ll come to me and say, look, ‘Give us tech.’”

On Monday, he announced that his company had launched a program called the Open Education Alliance, a partnership between Udacity, Georgia Tech and employers like Google, Autodesk, Intuit, AT&T, Nvidia and others. The goal is to work with employers to design a curriculum that will help students pursue technology careers.

This sort of specialized training is controversial, of course.

Some college professors, like Swarthmore College's Barry Schwartz, argue that higher education should exist to expose students to many different forms of thinking. That kind of education -- focused on learning, not job-related skills -- is unique to the U.S., he says.

“I don’t think that colleges and universities have done a very good job of defending themselves from assault and resisting the pressure to produce ‘practical’ results, understood as high-paying jobs,” he wrote last week. “If they don’t do a better job, higher education in the U.S. as we have known it will disappear.”

California, for its part, has aggressively pushed state universities to do more with online education. Udacity partnered with San Jose State University in January to teach remedial math courses to students. But the much-touted program has had mixed results. After two semesters, and low pass rates, San Jose State University administrators put the pilot program on hold in the fall so changes could be made to the curriculum.

Newsom said that, "like anything new, there's going to be setbacks." But he praised Udacity for helping to change how students learn. Students who want to re-watch a lecture can now do so on their own time, for example, making it easier for them to absorb the material.

"It's not mass education anymore," he said. "It's personalized."

In an interview with LinkedIn after the TechCrunch discussion, Newsom spoke more about the future of higher education, and whether students need a bachelor's degree. Highlights:

On how higher education fits into the technology revolution:

"Technology has radically leveled a lot of top-down, hierarchal institutions. The industrial economy that served us extraordinarily well for a century is now running out of gas. You've seen it in media; nobody predicted a guy named Craig would come along [and start Craigslist]. We've seen it in publishing. You've seen it, certainly, in the financial service industry. You're seeing it in transportation and every sector of the economy. We haven't seen the radical impact of technology on education yet."

On how universities could work with Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs):

"The university, the campus setting, is incredibly important. But it's about a hybrid," Newsom says. He can foresee a scenario where students take large, introductory courses at MOOCs -- say, English 101 -- before progressing to higher-level courses on campus.

On whether a bachelor's degree is still worth it:

"In some cases, it's not. In fact, in the vast majority of cases, it probably isn't. I'm an employer: I've got just shy of 800 people that I employ in 17 businesses. I kid you not, maybe I shouldn't acknowledge this, I could care less, with all due respect, where you graduated. I care about your experience, and I care about whatever the technical skills [you have]."

Photo: Getty Images Entertainment