How Disruptive Innovation Makes Some Colleges Into Ants And Others Into Grasshoppers

When Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen predicted that as many as half of American colleges could go bankrupt in the next 10 to 15 years, most of the leadership of American higher education refused to believe it.

It is an old and dangerous collegiate habit, perhaps ultimately born from the comforts of tenure, to trust the status quo. The title of a 2009 article from the Chronicle of Higher Education rather says it all, “In a Time of Uncertainty, Colleges Hold Fast to the Status Quo.”

The article begins, “The financial meltdown that has caused seismic upheavals in many other corners of the economy hasn’t changed much about how colleges operate.