“We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations, and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?" - Clifford Stoll, 1995: In a Newsweek article titled "The Internet? Bah!"
"I came across the fact that the web was growing at something like 2,300 percent a year. Anything growing that fast, even if its baseline usage today is tiny, is going to be big." - Jeff Bezos, in reference to his observation in 1994 that led to his founding of Amazon.com
These two observations exemplify a common dynamic for industries undergoing a transitional moment due to a disruptive technology.
The incumbents, played by Stoll, cling to the status quo and focus on the current moment. They continue to see the world as it is.
The innovators, played by Bezos, focus on the future. They see the world for what it is going to be. They manage to look past current consumer preferences and envision a future where an emerging technology is mature and embedded into our norms.
With many technologies (Metaverse! Blockchain!), the status quo persists. But even in those moments, the best incumbents stop to ask the hard questions.
If this technology is successful, what core assumptions in my industry might change? They hunt for the elephants in the room. The controversial statements that could upend their position in the market.
Small college leaders, much like business leaders of the 1990s, face one of these transitional moments today: to dismiss the tectonic shifts happening around them or to boldly ask the difficult questions that could unlock new paths to sustainability and success.
This is an introduction to a new blog series, which aims to help small college leaders confront the “elephants in the room”—the pressing, often uncomfortable questions facing our sector.
These are difficult times for most colleges, not just small ones. The decisions that leaders make in the coming years will have significant consequences for the futures of their institutions. So it is imperative to ask the most important questions.
However, this exercise is especially important for smaller institutions. Despite the current public sentiment, we believe that today’s emerging technological developments provide the opportunity for small colleges to emerge stronger than ever over the next decade. In fact, relative to larger institutions, we believe small institutions are uniquely positioned to benefit tremendously from the next decade of technological advancement in a way that will lead to a brighter future for their students, faculty, administrators, and the important communities they serve.
People often look toward the large R1s, with their research enterprises, immense resources, and powerful brands, to lead the way for the sector. And that may be the case in times of equilibrium.
But these are not those times. And in periods of turbulence and transition, when it is not size and scale that make the difference but agility, nimbleness, and boldness that matter most, we believe that small institutions have a better opportunity than anyone to lead the way into the next century of American higher education. As evidence, one need look no further than the history of innovation amidst technological shifts, where the dynamic that played out in e-commerce is the rule, not the exception.
The scale and resources of the Goliaths, strengths in times of stability, end up being weaknesses in times of change. Amidst change, it is the nimbleness and agility of Davids that prove victorious. Just as Amazon emerged from a garage to become a global powerhouse, we believe small colleges can seize this moment to lead higher education into its next chapter.
What is the first and most important step toward becoming Davids and capitalizing on the fast-moving developments of our sector? It is identifying the most important questions posed by the shifting reality underneath our feet and beginning an honest dialogue toward answering them. While these answers are surely not yet clear, one thing is for certain: the sooner we ask the right questions, the sooner we can collectively come to the right answers. In fact, as the example of Amazon and ecommerce shows, it is an institution’s very ability to grapple with the hard, important questions and come to the right solutions that will determine its long-term outcomes more than anything else.
A key component of Rize’s mission is to help small colleges weather these storms and emerge stronger than ever for their students, faculty, administrators, and the important communities they serve. And so in the posts that follow in this series, we will be posing what we believe are some of the most important and difficult questions we overhear in our many interactions with higher education leaders at conferences, campus visits, and Zoom calls.
For example:
While we are fascinated by the potential of new technologies, we are not Pollyana about it. It is crucial that higher education, and America more broadly, avoid the various dystopian futures that technology is more than capable of ushering into reality. No one wants a world in which our nation’s young adults stay in their parents’ basements, downloading skills from a mainframe like Neo in the Matrix. Even the leaders of our largest public institutions do not want the small colleges of America to be “brought to you by” their larger public counterparts. We cannot merge our way into a bright future any more than we can find salvation in the Metaverse. Avoiding these futures requires real human agency and action. Left to its own devices, technology is just as capable of dystopia as it is utopia. And there are millions of students, faculty, administrators, and communities depending on these institutions to not just survive but thrive.
So our goal with the blog posts in this series is to accelerate the conversations we already witness across the sector and to facilitate discussion amongst more members of our partner campuses. We are not under the illusion that we have the final answers to this test. In fact, the opposite is more likely the case: every institution has to come to its own unique answers for its own culture, mission, identity, and community. There is no one-size-fits all approach.
But in 20 years, our hope and expectation is that onlookers will look back with a similar sense of surprise that it was the small institutions who led the way toward a brighter future for higher education as a whole. But that will only happen if leaders and stakeholders confront the reality of the world we are quickly entering, and what that reality means for the future of their institutions and communities.
