Book Review: The Fifth Wave – The Evolution of American Higher Education

The book is written by Michael Crow, President of Arizona State University. Malcolm Gladwell describes President Crow and this book as follows: “In a perfect world, we would clone Michael Crow, so every university would have the same advantage as Arizona State University. Until that happens, The Fifth Wave is our next best option.” Robert J. Zimmer, former President of the University of Chicago and where I worked some years ago, also describes President Crow and this book as follows: “Michael Crow and William Dabars propose a new model for American universities. Their delineation of the history and evolution of American colleges and universities and their discussion of issues facing these institutions highlight the significance and gravity of these issues as well as the substantial contributions that research universities make to society.”

The eighteen main takeaways that I got out of this book are presented below:

• Our national discussion on higher education has been dominated by concerns with workplace relevance and skyrocketing costs, but to anyone who worries about growing inequality in America, the larger concern should be with broad accessibility to the sort of world-class learning environments now generally available only to more privileged applicants. In the globalized knowledge economy, both personal success and our collective social and economic prosperity are tied to advanced levels of educational attainment. But our leading colleges and universities admit only a fraction of academically qualified students… Even at our top public research universities, the majority of students do not reflect the socioeconomic diversity of our nation. The demands of both equity and prosperity argue that society needs to expand its capacity to produce millions of additional graduates during the next several decades capable of both catalyzing and benefiting from an economy increasingly based on the generation and application of useful know-edge. Moreover, the capacity of these institutions to produce world-leading discovery, creativity, and innovative solutions should be a matter of national concern. This will require epistemic, pedagogical, and institutional innovation, including the creative use of learning technologies and, in many cases, cooperation rather than competition among institutions as well as strategic partnerships among universities, business and industry, government agencies, and organizations in civil society.
• The transformation of Arizona State University during the past seventeen years demonstrates that research excellence and broad accessibility need not be mutually exclusive. ASU is committed to offering admission to all students qualified to undertake university-level coursework regardless of financial need. In so doing, the university seeks to advance socioeconomic mobility as well as prepare students for competitiveness in the global knowledge economy. ASU has succeeded in advancing both the academic rigor and diversity of the student body, which increasingly includes more and more students from socioeconomically disadvantaged and underrepresented backgrounds, including a significant percentage of first-generation college applicants. Through research learning and pedagogical innovation, students become adaptive master learners across a range of transdisciplinary fields, prepared to succeed in the continuously changing workforce of the knowledge-based economy. The successful implementation of the New American University model at Arizona State University suggests the potential for a subset of large-scale public research universities to similarly commit to expanding educational accessibility while facilitating discovery and innovation in the public interest.
• The American research university represents a uniquely successful model that combines undergraduate and graduate education with know-edge production and research and development. Our society increasingly depends on the educated citizens and ideas, products, and processes this set of institutions produces. Their integrated frameworks of research, development, and education contribute to the discovery, cre-ativity, and innovation that drive our economic competitiveness and determine our standard of living and quality of life. But the model for the American research university is limited by design, and the imperative for the evolution of new models that insist upon and leverage the complementarities and synergies between discovery and accessibility becomes obvious. The global preeminence of our leading institutions, moreover, does not correlate with overall excellence in American higher education. The nation has outgrown the existing infrastructure of research-grade academic platforms —colleges and universities whose academic frameworks are underpinned by discovery and knowledge production—and needs to expand its capacity to produce millions of additional graduates during the next several decades capable of both catalyzing and benefiting from an economy increasingly based on the generation and application of useful knowledge… The admissions policies of our leading institutions exclude the majority of academically qualified applicants, even as the demographic trends shaping our nation militate against the success of students from socioeconomically disadvantaged and historically underrepresented backgrounds. As de facto national policy, excluding the majority of academically qualified students from the excellence of a research-grade education is counterproductive and ethically unacceptable… The greatest predictor of academic success is not a student’s grades or SAT scores but rather family income and zip code. Half of our population does not exceed a 16 percent rate of bachelor’s degree attainment-a key determinant of social mobility and economic well-being-and students from families in the top income quartile are five times more likely to graduate from college with a bachelor’s degree than their peers from the bottom quartile.
• Through the integration of cutting-edge technological innovation with institutional cultures dedicated to the advancement of public value through academic enterprise, Fifth Wave universities will deliberately aspire to effect a shift in social outcomes toward equity and equality and assume a mandate to serve as frameworks for responsible innovation and sustainable development. Building on the accomplishments of institutional antecedents, Fifth Wave universities will endeavor to lend further purpose and capacity to the artistic creativity, humanistic and social scientific insight, and the scientific discoveries and technological innovations that our pluralistic democracy will need to draw on as the global community negotiates the encroaching challenges of the twenty-first century… There is no single codified model for the American research university, strictly speaking, of course, and considerable variation among these schools is evident in scope and scale, from small private institutions with a scientific and technological focus such as the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and MIT to comprehensive public universities epitomized by Ohio State and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. But for the purposes of the present organizational typology, these institutions bear a sufficiently striking family resemblance, the commonalities of which warrant their inclusion as representative of a unified institutional type.
• Fifth Wave universities can also function as pedagogical innovators by redesigning teaching and learning to meet contemporary needs for accessible high-quality education through technologically enabled massive-scale delivery. Historically, the small-scale liberal arts college model associated with the First Wave has been most representative of the university’s role in transmitting knowledge. Large public universities, beginning with the Second Wave, adapted this approach to support their mission of expanding access to education to broader segments of soci-ely, but even this more expansive approach has reached its limits. In the years ahead, pedagogical innovation will require massive-scale teaching and learning to meet increasing demands for education. Building on emergent capabilities in online teaching and learning methodologies, Fifth Wave universities will test, refine, and deploy new educational platforms to reach larger populations without spiraling costs.
• The New American University model reconceptualizes the American research university as a complex and adaptive comprehensive knowledge enterprise committed to discovery, creativity, and innovation, accessible to the demographically broadest possible student body, socioeconom-ically as well as intellectually, and directly responsive to the needs of the nation and society more broadly. The model combines accessibility to an academic platform underpinned by a pedagogical foundation of knowledge production, inclusiveness to a broad demographic representative of the socioeconomic diversity of the region and nation, and, through its breadth of activities and functions, an institutional commitment to maximizing societal impact commensurate with the scale of enrollment demand and the needs of our nation. The objective of the new model is to produce not only knowledge and innovation but also adaptive master learners empowered to integrate a broad array of interrelated disciplines and negotiate over their lifetimes the changing workforce demands and shifts in the knowledge economy driven by continual innovation… The comprehensive reconceptualization of Arizona State University constitutes the prototype for the New American University model. The reconceptualization was motivated by an overarching concern with accessibility to academic excellence, especially in response to the demographic trends. To restore the social compact implicit in American public higher education, ASU revived the intentions and aspirations of the historical public research university model, which, building on the ideals of the Morrill Act, sought to provide broad accessibility as well as engagement with society. By some estimates the public research universities of our nation taken together have produced more than 70 percent of all baccalaureate degree recipients and conducted two-thirds of all funded research. The new institutional model builds on this legacy and thus expands enrollment capacity, promotes diver-sity, and offers accessibility to an academic milieu of world-class knowledge production to a diverse and heterogeneous student body representative of the demographic profile of the state, which includes a significant proportion of students from socioeconomically diverse and underrepresented backgrounds, as well as a preponderant share of first-generation college applicants.
• Only about a hundred years ago there were no universities in the United States. The institutions that now bear that title, but claim a longer pedigree, started out [as] colleges, seminaries, and the like. They grew into universities by adopting some functions and abandoning others, and this happened piecemeal, so that in most cases the question of the integral character of the institution was never raised explicitly. Within the last hundred years, large numbers of new institutions calling themselves universities have come into being, but with rare exceptions they have taken their form from established universities either in this country or elsewhere and have not set out to confront the question of what one would create if one could really start from scratch and redesign the educational system as a whole… If the United States is to retain its leadership and competitiveness in the globalized knowledge economy-and if individuals are to succeed in an era when knowledge correlates with prosperity and well-being-it is imperative for policymakers and the general public to recognize that millions more Americans will need access to research-grade, or what we also term research-pedagogic, learning environments. This is to say that the academic infrastructure of our nation must reconcile the demands of accessibility with the potential of world-class knowledge production and innovation. But, as we assess throughout these chapters, whether by design or default, our nation’s leading major research universities have failed to scale-up enrollment capacities commensurate with demand or proportionate to the growth of the population.
• Although America’s leading research universities, both public and private, consistently dominate global rankings, our nations success in establishing and maintaining worla-class levels of academic excellence in a relative handful of institutions is insufficient to ensure the broad and equitable distribution of the benefits of research-grade educational attainment, nor does it sufficiently correlate with the production of graduates with the advanced competencies and skills essential to sustain our continued national competitiveness. As nations worldwide invest strategically to educate broader segments of their citizenry for the knowledge economy, America’s leading research universities generally maintain modest enrollment levels that have remained virtually unchanged since the mid-twentieth century… For those alarmed over the increasing inequality in our society and the threat such inequity poses to our social cohesion and collective prosperity, it should be a matter of urgent concern that, among families in the top quartile of household incomes, 82 percent of children will attend college compared with only 45 percent from families in the bottom quartile. Students from families in the top income quartile are five times more likely to graduate from college with a bachelor’s degree by the age of twenty-four than those from the lowest income quartile—58 percent as opposed to 11 percent. For the second-to-bottom quartile, the rate is 20 percent. A bachelor’s degree is a key determinant of social mobility and economic potential, but the degree attainment rate for half of our population does not exceed 16 percent. Although the rate for the various income quartiles fluctuates, it remains highly unequal. The disparity between the lowest and highest income quartiles was even starker just a few years ago. In 2013 students from families in the top income quartile were eight times more likely to graduate from college with a bachelor’s degree than their peers from the bottom quartile —77 percent as opposed to 9 percent.
• The proposition that accessibility and academic excellence need not be mutually exclusive is implicit in the conception of the New American University and the Fifth Wave. However, if one accepts the explicit dimensions of accessibility and excellence, their juxtaposition evokes tensions inherent in contemporary academic culture that Craig Calhoun perceives to be both ideological and unlikely to be resolved. His explication of the relationship between accessibility and excellence reveals tacit dimensions of both concepts that are essential and fundamental to our understanding of the imperative for the Fifth Wave. Whether or not one subscribes to the notion that the quest for excellence inherently and inevitably reduces accessibility to higher education for large numbers of underrepresented students, Calhoun finds that the pursuit of excellence as it is commonly understood by academic culture has compelled institu tions to “invest in a competition that has become an end in itself” As a consequence, he observes, “Universities are becoming much more unequal at the same time that higher education and research are being organized, funded, and marketed in more integrated ways and on larger scales-nationally, regionally, and globally.” Fifth Wave universities oppose narrow consequences that accrue primarily to students of affluent parents… Instead, the Fifth Wave will provide access to academic excellence to students from the broadest possible demographic through academic enterprise that is funded and marketed in a manner that is scalable.
• Although the emerging Fifth Wave comprises varied and differentiated institutional actors spanning academia, business and industry, government, and civil society, the envisioned formation of a league of Fifth Wave colleges and universities builds most proximately on the foundations of the New American University model operationalized at Arizona State University. This new model complements the existing model for large-scale public research universities and represents an inflection point in the transition from the late stages of the Fourth Wave to the emergence of the Fifth Wave. The model combines accessibility to an academic milieu characterized by discovery and a pedagogical foundation of knowledge production, inclusiveness to a broad demographic representative of the socioeconomic diversity of the region and nation, and, through its breadth of functionality, maximization of societal impact. The foundational prototype of the New American University model has been operationalized at Arizona State University since 2002 through a comprehensive reconceptualization that has produced an institution with sufficient scope and scale to offer broad accessibility to an academic platform of world-class knowledge production focused on societal outcomes… ASU ranks among the top ten public universities in its enrollment of National Merit Scholars, surpassing Stanford, MIT, Duke, Brown, UCLA, and Berkeley, and among the top three producers of Fulbright Scholars, tied with Princeton and Rutgers and coming in behind only Harvard and the University of Michigan… Educational attainment remains the most obvious contributor to the development of human capital and knowledge capital, and its impact on individual prosperity is well documented. There is still no better investment than a four-year degree: with annual returns greater than 15 percent by some estimates, college education offers twice the return on investment of stocks, and at least three times the return for corporate bonds, gold, treasury bills, and housing.
• To achieve the ambitious objectives of the New American University model, ASU adopted academic enterprise as its operational model. Characterized by a commitment to responsivity, maximization of clear goals, and adaptiveness, the academic enterprise model emerging from ASU represents a new approach to advancing knowledge production and innovation and the multidimensional social, cultural, and economic mission of a publicly purposed major research university. In the following we articulate the rationale for ASU’s transformation into an academic enterprise and the opportunities that come from rethinking the foundational bureaucratic and public agency assumptions upon which higher education in the United States has to this point emerged… ASU did not attain university status until 1958 and conducted no significant funded research prior to 1980-roughly one hundred years later than most other major research universities. Because the Carnegie Foundation did not grant ASU research-extensive (“Research I’”) status until 1994, conferring on it recognition as one of a handful of institutions without both an agricultural and medical school to be thus designated, ASU may legitimately claim to be one of the nation’s youngest major research universities.
• Acknowledging the certainty of major environmental and societal crises in the decades ahead, ASU has announced the formation of the Global Futures Laboratory, which seeks to position the university as a global hub of scholars collaborating to address the most critical issues of our planet, including the transition of the societal, natural, and biogeochemical systems of planet Earth. Specific focal areas explore new energy systems, food security and land degradation, environmental and public health, depletion of natural resources, water scarcity, decision-making and behavior, and the imperative for new economies. The natural and socioeconomic systems of our planet are on nonsustainable paths, and some subsystems are close to or have exceeded critical thresholds. Global Futures represents the commitment of the university to advancing knowledge production and innovation that seek to secure a habitable planet and future in which prosperity and well-being are broadly attainable.
• As a university that engages globally, ASU seeks to overcome barriers to educational access at global scale. Through Open Scale Courseware, ASU offers free courses and transferable credits to students in nearly every country in the world. Through Global Launch, the largest intensive English program in the United States, ASU provides English instruction to the largest international student population of any university in the nation… Commitment to global engagement is among the core design aspirations that have guided institutional innovation. By established metrics, ASU has become an undisputed leader in the internationalization of higher education. ASU welcomes students from 136 countries around the world and endeavors to be of service to individuals from all nations. For the third consecutive year, ASU is among the leading host institutions in the United States for international students. With more than 13,000 international students enrolled in 2017, the university is home to the largest international student population in the nation among public uni-versities. According to the Institute of International Education (IIE), the profile of the international student population at ASU corresponds to the IlE compilation of leading places of origin for international students in the United States: China, followed by India, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea. ASU sends over two thousand students to study abroad each year, and maintains international partnerships with universities on six continents… As a public and social value enterprise, ASU endeavors to solve challenges of global scale, enhance the quality of life for people around the world, and promote global stability that benefits national security interests. These projects fall under the broad umbrella of international development, and are funded by the federal government through agencies such as USAID, the U.S. Department of State, Millennium Challenge Corporation, and international organizations such as the World Bank and United Nations World Food Programme.
• But of course a league could dedicate member institutions to the advancement of collective action. Elinor Ostrom, Nobel laureate in economics recognized for her analysis of economic governance, sought to understand collaboration in this context and frames this objective in terms of governing the commons. This assumes the conception of knowledge as a commons, which is to say, a shared resource. But, unlike the tragedy of the commons assessed by Garret Hardin, wherein shared resources are inevitably degraded as stakeholders each seek to maximize personal gain —he provides the example of herdsmen whose increasing numbers of cattle will eventually overgraze an open pasture – knowledge is never diminished with its use. But any framework for analyzing the knowledge commons, as Ostrom and Charlotte Hess explain, must “factor in the economic, legal, technological, political, social, and psychological components-each complex in its own right—that make up this global commons… Scale is generally conceptualized in terms of enrollment numbers and is inextricably linked with the concept of access, but the concept of scale is both far more complicated and complex. Of course, one might speak of the scale of the impact of an institution in terms of its research enterprise, for example, in which case a small institution like Caltech has outsized impact. Or one could evaluate the scale of the impact of an institution in terms of its public engagement or societal advancement… Scale is a multidimensional assessment that must not only consider size but also representation —is a university large enough for the population it is tasked with serving? Two institutions of the same size in terms of enrollment can exert drastically different levels of impact depending on their missions and objectives and the demographics of their respective student populations. Scale, then, must be an assessment of how much value a university can contribute to society.
• The number of bachelor’s degrees awarded by the eight institutions of the Ivy League during the academic year 2016-2017 totaled 15,595, while the top fifty liberal arts colleges awarded 23,074 (ASU awarded 25,974 degrees in academic year 2017-2018, including 7.796 graduate and professional degrees.) During the same academic year, the Ivies rejected 258,355 applicants, while the liberal arts colleges turned away 223,790 or, if we include the military academies, 229,307. This pattern of exclusion is consistent with the trend among leading public uni-versities, which continue to raise standards even while enrollment demand increases.
• Fifth Wave universities may be among the only institutions in society that are positioned to facilitate the conversations that are needed to govern the strongly held and often incommensurate positions of opposing groups. Since they are firmly embedded in local cultures, Fifth Wave universities are in a better position than earlier waves to resist the mimetic impulse that entices other universities to emulate the approaches of venerated institutions that may nevertheless be inappropriate to local needs.
• Fifth Wave Knowledge Production Is Transdisciplinary – Transdisciplinarity is the overarching attribute of Mode 2 knowledge production as well as the dominant organizing principle of institutional design in Fifth Wave knowledge enterprises. A committee of the National Research Council characterizes transdisciplinarity as research that “aims to deeply integrate and also transcend disciplinary approaches to generate fundamentally new conceptual frameworks, theories, models, and applications.” An editorial in Science framed the imperative for the transdisciplinary collaboration characteristic of the Fifth Wave more than a decade ago: “The time is upon us to recognize that the new frontier is the interface, wherever it remains unexplored… In the years to come, innovators will need to jettison the security of familiar tools, ideas, and specialties as they forge new partnerships.” The Fifth Wave seeks to facilitate the expansion of the “seamless web of cognitive influence among the individual disciplines” that for Cole is the hallmark of great universities.
• If the Fifth Wave is to be held to account, it must assume primary responsibility for sustaining reason, science, humanism, and progress – the ideals that have defined our nation from the outset—along with what Pinker terms that “great Enlightenment experiment, American constitutional democracy with its checks on government power.” And because democracies are inherently epistemic, as we considered in chapter 4, knowledge is the “foundation for democratic governance,” as Clark Miller points out.” The implications of what has been termed the epis-temic case for democracy are consistent with Fifth Wave academic culture and begin with the supposition that there may be wisdom in the collective, which has been variously assessed in terms of collective intel-ligence, cognitive diversity, or the wisdom of crowds.