There is a profound structural shift underway in teaching and learning today. We all know it intellectually, but we need to know it when we look harder, deeper. We see it in our kids and how they connect with the global community, how they see a lifelong job in one sector as a relic of the past, how they expect to hold 15 or 30 jobs in a lifetime. Today’s reality is about lifelong learning and the constant evolution and upgrading of skills. College, post secondary education of all sorts, must be a state of mind and not just a slice of time.

The entrepreneurial spirit of students to pursue their dreams, get a job, build a career and care for their families is driven by the ruthless grip of the marketplace of ideas in the 21st Century global community. You can get trained as an accountant or virtually any other career and have the bottom fall out of the industry in 5 years as firms outsource what they consider commodity work to India. Those stories are real as evidenced by Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. The winners individually and collectively will be those who value a new approach to their own abilities. Change is real not because it’s cool rhetoric and put an African American in the White House but because it’s the only way to survive in difficult times.

In the end, the only real safety net of tomorrow is education.

The only tool—the only answer—the only protection—is easy, open and affordable access to opportunity to constantly upgrade your skills so you can evolve with the market and constantly adapt in new ways. The fundamental job of state government is to provide access to opportunity to lifelong learning. And yet, despite the implications, we still see the old silos of education in different early learning, K-12 and higher education buckets that serves only the institutional infrastructure of government.

There is ultimately no protection in our economy from the hurricane economic surge of commoditization. You can hold it back temporarily, or pretend you can, but that force has gravity on its side and it will never, ever, lose in the long term.

The change is not easy and it is not pretty. Our institutions of higher education are addicted to the tradition of silo-driven orientation.

Institutions of higher education today are struggling and, in many cases, holding back the barriers of change not because they are opposed to evolution per se, in my view, but because students are changing so quickly. Kids today are scary for institutions of higher education not because they are radical or angry but because they vote with their feet in their own self interests to learn. If a professor sucks and has awful content, you can’t hide it anymore. When the college president makes millions, it gets uncomfortable for some to put that on the front page. The gig is up. The power of transparency can be awesome and mighty and terrifying.

The larger systems change is driven by the radical shift in content. Is a tenured professor or subject matter expert with credentials—as defined by some distant institutions or organization—really the very best person to teach? Perhaps but only if they have the soul of a teacher! Is a published book the best measurement of a professor or instructor’s domain expertise? Perhaps but probably not. Are the old models working today when extraordinary, unique, value-driven lectures can be found for free across the planet? Nope. Do you have to attend Harvard or the University of Washington to have access to the top professors in the world in a given area or can you listen in, engage and participate from your apartment in Ballard? Tough, uncomfortable questions.

Even these questions are geared to the students who are engaged in higher education. What of the millions of people in our state who are disengaged, disconnected and removed from higher education? Our system embraces a kid when they show up to learn, but what about those who don’t show up?

Strategically there is an argument to be made that access to information for everyone (those engaged and those disconnected) through technology–ready access to powerful, insightful, relevant, customized, free content–is the most disruptive force in higher education today. Yet we struggle to convince institutions of higher education in Washington to share even the most modest content….the perceived control and ownership of curricula is sacred….digital content is seen as attached to silos (for some strange reason)…a community college adjunct professor still requires a signed pass to access the University of Washington library system….and on and on.

As a general rule the institutions of higher education hold firm, despite our rhetoric, to rigid models of teaching and learning. Radical, disruptive debate about systems change is great in theory, tough in reality when you have to live and die by the marketplace of ideas.

So where are we going?

A number of major initiatives worldwide highlight the changes. Few more so than the University of Phoenix and other public and private sector on line institutions and efforts. The reason is less about on line methods themselves and more about the customization of learning. Read this Washington Monthly article if you want a jolt of realty. Here’s the guts of it:

“Which means the day is coming—sooner than many people think—when a great deal of money is going to abruptly melt out of the higher education system, just as it has in scores of other industries that traffic in information that is now far cheaper and more easily accessible than it has ever been before. Much of that money will end up in the pockets of students in the form of lower prices, a boon and a necessity in a time when higher education is the key to prosperity. Colleges will specialize where they have comparative advantage, rather than trying to be all things to all people.”

You go on line to get exactly what you want, when you want it, in a form that works for you. Is a degree from Harvard still worth a lot? Of course, and the economic data around the escalation of income associated with degree and education levels remains unquestioned.

In the end, we need to educate more people to higher levels, but we need to do so with courageous honesty about quality, efficiency, affordability and new models.

Distance learning, shared digital content, back end infrastructure like servers, and other areas of technology are just the canary in the coalmine. The larger issue facing higher education is only symbolized by technology.

Perhaps the two largest on line initiatives in the state are the University of Washington’s Extension Program and the Community and Technical Colleges Washington OnLine system. The former is $100 million annual business unit within the UW and the latter provides services to nearly 20,000 full time equivalent students at the 34 colleges statewide. They are both massive and successful exactly because they are radically focused on students and helping instructors to meet real needs of real people living real lives.

Instructors with the spirit of education inside of them drive our learning. Great teachers change lives, that’s not going to change in the course of human history. But we need to empower them to succeed by pushing, prodding and agitating for a more aggressive approach to leaping into the 21st Century. We cannot afford for teachers to play the role of cynic about our children’s future by resisting the opening up of information. I see my job helping instructors come alive with knowledge about technology and instructional tools in today’s world. Let them connect with students but do so with courageous honesty about what our kids need in tomorrow’s world.

As a side note: House Bill 1946, the Higher Education Technology Transformation Task Force, is a bill I wrote and passed in my first session. I blogged about it here. To date there has only been one meeting of the full task force despite my prodding. The Higher Education Coordinating Board is, unfortunately, not really sure whether it is excited about this opportunity or terrified. It’s still being treated like a department down the hall. Even in the obvious area of technology, I remain hopeful that the institutions will embrace the opportunity of this structural economic crisis-that is, today’s budget mess—and move forward with the type of system efficiencies we know we need. It’s not really about saving money, candidly, it’s about increasing value.

As we explore larger issues, it’s time to directly and openly put on the table that the University of Washington is in a league of its own. I’ve discussed this issue previously. That is not a negative reflection on Washington State University or the comprehensive regional universities and the Evergreen State College or the robust, flexible, engaged and successful community and technical college system (disclosure: I served on the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges from 2005-2009). It is economic reality as evidenced by the ripple effect of jobs, economic activity and non state partnerships. And there are profoundly important implications to that. Let’s embrace this conversation more boldly.

The UW is one of the most important institutions of higher education in the world—and it faired extremely well under the old philosophical regime of higher education (with a special thank you to Senator Warren G. Magnuson who created the model of how the medical center could succeed)—yet even it has yet to courageously embrace bold internal systems reforms that would help set the course for the 21st Century.

One of the fundamental policy questions facing the UW is this: How do we allow them to operate in a more market-oriented way—and know that they will do so with high integrity and entrepreneurial spirit with a willingness to embrace systems change—while protecting the public mission, DNA and values of affordable access to higher education? Simply, we don’t want to privatize the UW and lose the spirit of its public mission that is part of the soul of our state’s history. We need a new, entrepreneurial approach so the UW runs more effectively and efficiently internally and externally in ‘exchange’ for a newfound freedom to operate (including tuition authority, capital construction authority, etc.). Yet we (the Legislature, public) need to guard, measure and oversee it’s approach to the public mission. We can’t sell our soul because we’ll never get it back. We want efficiency and we want equity. The obligation to fund higher education from the ‘top to the bottom’ does not go away if we let the reins go free. The moral obligation of state government is to engage, to step up, to treasure an educated citizenry. We can’t treat higher education like a department down the hall of state government. It’s part of the soul of our success.

There are those who criticize the University of Washington for being elitist and exclusive. I believe we want the UW to be elitist and exclusive in the marketplace of ideas as it relates not to their attitude or arrogance but their performance on the world stage. We want them to be the best of the best and to tackle problems with courageous conviction and passion to succeed across the planet. To embrace the world’s toughest research problems, to solve world hunger, to create new companies in biotech, to partner with the Gates Foundation to bring medical services to the world’s poor. To create enlightened citizens and empower success in government, economics, business, medicine and law. To be a bright light on the hill of knowledge. We should be so proud of our native son who has grown from a small neighborhood of Seattle to the world stage of ideas. The UW’s success is our success. Why do some resent their own child? And yet, tough love requires the courage to engage in a real dialogue about how we can be better together.

As we explore new public policy models of funding and oversight, we need to ask the question whether our traditional model of treating all institutions in our state alike is, in fact, the wrong path. Just as higher education is structurally changing worldwide, so must we reflect those values here at home.

It’s time for a new approach to the four-year institutions and the relationship with the two year system. Our policy goal is to educate more people to higher levels. But we will not succeed at scaling that goal—really changing the paradigm of who we reach—unless we engage in systems reform.

The modest animosity between the two and four year system is an undercurrent that we must bring to the surface. Cries of elitism come from both sides—the ultimate irony. But this hurts. Both systems require a new approach to how they operate not because the Legislature is out of money and funding is being reduced whether we accept it or not, but because the pain of the old way of thinking has hit the tipping point.

The fundamental policy, moral and economic issue of our time is: What would the system of higher education in Washington look like if we have the courageous honesty to start anew and build it from the ground up? No, I do not suggest a task force to look into the question. I merely raise the question.

We have a very strong two year system but in that success sometimes comes the institutional arrogance of complacency and a feeling that change is easier for others. The two year system is slowly but genuinely exploring deep questions of relevancy, mission, outcomes and student achievement. It’s hard work and taking years to accomplish, but the journey is real. We have a four year system that wants to pretend its flexible to meet today’s student needs but in reality it struggles–like colleges in other states–with how to reach the tens of thousands of potential students who are not at the door.

What would a different governance system look like that had, for example, a state Board of Regents with fiduciary control over the money? What would a model look like if we integrated two and four year institutions more directly? What would our labor relations look like if we bargained at the state level? What would students experience if you could access content anywhere from Grays Harbor to Seattle regardless of the institution in which you were enrolled? What would it look like if the state provided funding for a full two years of post secondary learning—of any sort—as part of its obligation to you as a citizen? What would your life be like if you went from high school into a customized, personalized, targeted program of learning—from the fancy UW programs to a welding shop anywhere—that was right for you as an individual?

I don’t know the answers anymore than anyone else. But I feel we have hit a tipping point where the pain and cost to our society and our future of not asking these questions has become too high.

We need an enlightened citizenry, educated and empowered individuals and lifelong learners to feel they have a voice in their own future. We need to stop talking at young people and start listening.

We can be so much more than what we’ve become.

Yes we can.

Your partner in service, Reuven.