Is higher education in great danger and is it inevitable?

So asks Prof. Yossi Ra'anan from the School of Business Administration at the College of Administration ● According to him the answer to both questions is positive. "Nowadays there is more and more a tendency to test people based on what they know, and not based on how many hours they spent in class or in one or another institution"

"One of the absurdities is that the absolute majority of the developers who led us to the digital age are university graduates. It's just that the universities themselves don't understand what the revolution might cause them themselves, maybe a little digital marketing but nothing more." This is what Prof. Yossi Ra'anan from the School of Business Administration said, and who participated in the People and Computers Thinking Digital conference.

According to Raanan, "Knowledge continues to increase at an exponential rate. The whole world is connected. 5.1 billion digital devices are already connected and this will continue to grow at a rapid pace. Today, students do not depend on the location - they do not need a classroom. A lot of material is found online, most of it is free. All barriers to entry have been removed and completely different marketing and information access methods have been developed."

"Students have completely different expectations," Raanan said. "When we went to university there was a feeling of awe. They did us a favor by letting us in. It no longer exists today. The students expect a different service. They expect the availability of an administrative and academic survey 24/7."

"On the other hand, there is a huge demand for higher education. From 1999 to 2012 there was an increase of 155%, which made it possible for new populations to enter," Raanan explains. "Today there is an oversupply of higher education institutions in the State of Israel. The budgets, on the other hand, either decrease or remain absolute and there is a tendency to woo the client. The organization adjusts its products according to customer feedback. And the more we do it, the more we have the ability to adapt the products and services to people individually."

The lecturer is not available

"What does this do to us in higher education"? asks Prof. Ra'anan and explains that "students today come and want to combine studies with work in a much smoother way. There are still higher education institutions that can prepare a system for a master's degree in four courses, each on a different day and at different times. They expect faculty to be available at all times and look forward to feedback. When I didn't answer the students by email on a weekend, within 24 hours a complaint flew to the whole system - 'the lecturer is unavailable'."

"There is also the pressure of grades from high schools," he said. "The fact that they used to yell at the child after the teacher told the parents that the child was not studying well. Today the parents are yelling at the teacher. There is an immediate distribution of correct or incorrect information, a bad review even if it is incorrect - gets a lot of likes."

According to Prof. Ra'anan, "Disruptive technology is technology that enters existing markets and offers a more limited but faster, cheaper service and provides it to populations that previously avoided using the product and service. The lower service in both content and price is below the dignity of the established providers in the market. Over time, these products, of course, mostly gain strength, accumulate profits and move up the market, and by the time the established ones realize what happened to them, they are out of the market and the new ones have taken their place."

"Examples of this are computer companies such as Boros, CDC, Tandem Computers, which dealt with mainframes, and disappeared because they did not adapt to the PC era. Blockbuster raked in huge profits until Netflix came along and made them an exercise from the movies."

Is higher education in danger?

The question is, is higher education also in danger of being replaced by another technology?

According to Prof. Raanan, the answer is yes. "Clayton Christiansen, who studies the field, said that the digital natives are becoming old enough to be the bosses of the 'digital immigrants', i.e. those who were caught up in the digital revolution at an older age."

"In the United States, 12.5% ​​of all students in higher education are enrolled in programs that are all based on distance learning," he said. "The big universities largely ignore this. There are some programs but no complete degrees. The digital universities charge 20% of the tuition fees of the old universities, and they still have nowhere to go."

"There is today more and more a tendency to test people based on what they know and not based on how many hours they spent in class or in one or another institution. The place of obtaining the knowledge is not interesting. If a good programmer comes to you and proves it, you won't necessarily ask him if he has a certificate from here and here and here. You can see it in a trial month", Raanan clarifies.

"In conclusion, higher education is in great danger and is it inevitable? According to Christensen there is a possibility that it will escape this but if it does it contradicts everything we have learned in the last 20 years about the impact of the digital revolution. Prof. Raanan concludes.