Start-up universities such as Ashoka University in India inject new energy into the higher education system. Image: Wikimedia CommonsTwelve years ago, an astronomer from a liberal arts college and an ethicist from a research university walked into a bar in Chicago. Despite our different backgrounds, over hazy IPAs we discovered a mutual frustration with the ways in which colleges and universities imitate each other in a race for improved college rankings and prestige.
This system famously resists solutions that reduce costs and improve quality. It also presents nearly insurmountable odds for new entrants as they compete for attention, mobilise the resources for new campuses and navigate the six-dimensional chess game required to hire faculty, design curriculum, gain accreditation and attract students.
Since sharing beers in Chicago, each of us has been drawn into launching a new university in Asia (Yale-NUS in Singapore and Duke Kunshan University in China) and this led us to write a book together about the explosion of start-up colleges and universities in every part of the globe.
This is what we discovered: despite the long odds, entrepreneurial leaders around the world are offering innovative, high quality educational ventures from which we all can learn.
Global but local
Some new universities offer the highest quality undergraduate education at home that was formerly only available to students who could afford to study in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Ashoka University (India), Ashesi University (Ghana) and Fulbright University Vietnam provide high impact student learning at a fraction of the cost of a US education. These schools have also sought to recover and reimagine ancient traditions of learning in countries that previously offered only more colonial forms of education. They have adapted an American liberal arts style of education to foreground local knowledge.
Other new universities are pioneering a network model in which students learn together in distributed sites rather than a single central campus. Minerva University, founded in 2012, offers students who come from families with modest annual incomes a chance to live in dynamic world cities instead of a static and isolated campus.
Founded in 2014, the African Leadership University (ALU) built two campuses in Mauritius and Rwanda and then expanded to a set of regional hubs across the continent and a career accelerator programme – all in the service of fostering new kinds of leaders for Africa who are ethical and entrepreneurial, and at a cost of US$3,000 per year.
While driving down costs, both Minerva and ALU bring a distinctive focus on teaching the underlying habits and skills of learning rather than the more traditional transmission of specific content.
New approaches to staffing
Many of the schools we studied have an intensive focus on student learning rather than faculty research. ALU, Ashesi, Fulbright, Minerva and Olin College of Engineering offer stable employment that is performance-based rather than a traditional tenure model.
Yet faculty at these institutions exert considerable influence and enjoy a remarkable sense of common purpose in their commitment to students. They also share a strong commitment to each other and to the larger collective enterprise, owing in part to the absence of traditional siloed departmental structures.
Other institutions we featured, such as Yale-NUS and NYU Abu Dhabi, offer traditional forms of tenure that include strong rewards for research productivity. What marks them as educationally distinctive is a core curriculum for a truly global student body that provides a shared language and deepens the quality of community interaction.
For established universities confronting increasingly polarised campuses, the different ways that our start-ups have constructed their common core could serve as helpful starting points.
Examples include the common curriculum at Yale-NUS College, an ambitious array of interdisciplinary courses taken by all students at the same time, including dialogues about the greatest works of literature, philosophy and social thought from authors across Europe, Asia and other parts of the global South. Also, the Arab Crossroads Curriculum at NYU Abu Dhabi, which provides an interdisciplinary exploration of the ways the Middle East and North Africa region has been shaped and has shaped the intellectual and economic world.
Interdisciplinary approaches and continuous adjustment
Many of our start-up universities also found new ways for faculty and students to make connections across the curriculum and the campus by wedding disciplinary knowledge to much more versatile interdisciplinary approaches. The result has been a profusion of curricular innovation expanding our conceptions of what is possible in undergraduate education.
Ashoka University requires nine foundational courses that range from Indian civilisations to mind and behaviour as well as majors like economics and history and computer science and entrepreneurial leadership.
Minerva University offers majors such as design across the humanities and managing complexity that are embedded in a curriculum that enables students to connect their learning across multiple years of studies while being based in multiple world cities.
While many existing universities include interdisciplinary courses and even majors, such work is often considered experimental, or constrained by an institutional culture dominated by disciplines and departments. By building new courses that cross these disciplinary lines, new universities can enable students to tackle much-needed areas of study that defy conventional academic boundaries.
Examples include the four-year leadership curriculum at Ashesi University in Ghana, which allows students to integrate lessons from the classroom with their lives as students as they become the type of ethical entrepreneurial leaders that Ashesi hopes will promote a ‘renaissance in Africa’.
Also, new courses in Vietnamese studies developed at Fulbright University Vietnam, which explore the many dimensions of Vietnam’s culture, politics and economics as it has evolved after the ‘American War’ of the previous century.
Many start-ups, by abandoning disciplinary departments, can also structure their degree programmes along interdisciplinary lines of inquiry that strongly incorporate experiential learning.
Examples include the African Leadership University, which has several immersive internships and real-world experiences as part of the curriculum in entrepreneurship, and the project-based learning curriculum at Olin College of Engineering, where students begin designing new inventions in their first year of study, and continue through all four years to even develop designs for their own companies as part of the curriculum.
A culture of continuous iteration
Start-up universities face strong pressures to trim their sails. Externally, authoritarian governments threaten free and open inquiry. Internally, faculty and students seek the comfort of traditional ways when the initial educational design inevitably proves unwieldy.
Those schools that succeeded in navigating these 2.0 moments were clear-eyed in recognising when the audacity of the original vision required significant re-working in practice. And they brought the same level of intentionality and coherence to their re-founding moments as they did to their original period of design and launch.
Many developed a culture of continuous iteration and adjustment rather than the more usual curricular review every generation or so.
As we learned more about these new universities, we came away inspired by the combination of intellectual courage, entrepreneurial audacity and adaptive leadership it takes to invent educational institutions today.
Their stories made us more hopeful about higher education compared to when we first met in Chicago more than a decade ago. They offer lessons for future founders of new universities – and for those who want to renew and rejuvenate existing ones.
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