The Mega-Universities Disrupting Higher Education

The theory of disruptive innovation suggests that new players can enter a marketplace by offering services to overlooked consumers, eventually reshaping entire industries. In the higher education sector, this theory has profound implications as emerging institutions challenge traditional models. This has resulted in a surge in enrollment at new low-cost, flexible institutions, many of which operate on online platforms and cater to working adults. This shift is giving rise to an increasing number of “mega-universities" — massively scaled institutions that are rewriting some of the rules of higher education.

As these institutions scale, they also are shifting the “value proposition” of higher education to maximize convenience and efficiency over the traditional metrics of pure academic excellence, selectivity and world-class scholarship. For many students and their families these new criteria offer a different form of value. Michael Horn, co-Founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and a Forbes contributor, notes that for these largest institutions, “quality looks nothing like a traditional college or university — it's orthogonal to it” and suggests that instead of thinking of quality, it is better to consider value, which Horn defines as “outcomes divided by costs.”

The Growth Of The Mega-University

Within the United States, the largest single universities include Western Governors University, Southern New Hampshire University, and Arizona State University. This year, WGU's enrollment and SNHU enrolled 183,104 students. Other rising mega-universities include Liberty University, which currently enrolls 140,000 students, and Grand Canyon University, with a total enrollment of more than 118,000 students. Arizona State University enrolls nearly 80,000 students on-campus and more than 65,000 online learners, making it the third largest university in the U.S. ASU has accomplished this massive scale while retaining much of its legacy capacity for quality on-campus education and its ability for world-class research, focusing on interdisciplinary problems.

Other traditional universities have noticed ASU’s strategy of growth, promoted by its dynamic president Michael Crow as a “Fifth Wave University.” Examples include Purdue University, which started Purdue Global and now enrolls more than 45,000 students; the University of Maryland Global Campus, which was the 19^th largest institution by enrollment in fall 2021 with 55,323 students; and the University of Central Florida, one of the fastest-growing universities in the country, with more than 82,000 students; and Texas A&M University, currently enrolling 77,000 students.

Scale, Quality And Value

The largest mega-universities are optimized for working adults and have developed flexible online platforms for learning, often enhanced with artificial intelligence. WGU’s competency-based education model enables students to demonstrate skill acquisition and complete courses at their own pace, instead of within fixed credit hours. ASU has expanded its online platform, ASU Digital Immersion, and with its partnership with OpenAI has launched an AI Innovation Challenge for faculty and staff to promote AI solutions across in all areas on campus. SNHU’s AI-powered chatbot "Penny" is designed to advise students on academics, finances, and wellness and has already increased student retention and performance. WGU has developed the Aera Decision Cloud platform to enable AI to predict student outcomes and recommend interventions to faculty.

Outcomes Divided By Costs

These mega-universities provide outcomes well below the most selective universities, but at a much more affordable cost. WGU and SNHU have graduation rates after eight years of 54% and 35%, compared to the national average six-year graduation rate of 67% for four-year universities, and 43% for community colleges. Top public universities such as UCLA, UC Berkeley, the University of Michigan, perform much better, with six-year graduation rates averaging above 90%, and the top Ivy+ universities graduate more than 96% of students over six years, but with much different student populations.

Few traditional universities arguably can compete with the efficiency and cost of the mega-university, however. WGU’s competency-based model results in an average degree completion time of just 2.5 years — far more efficient that traditional universities. And the costs are hard to beat — WGU and SNHU offer an annual tuition of approximately $8,010 and $9,600, respectively. These figures compare very well to four-year public universities, which charge an average annual tuition of $9,750 and $27,500 for in- and out-of state students, and with private universities, which charge more than $38,000 annually for tuition.

Quality At Scale?

The mega-university student experience is drastically different from the traditional university. In many cases, students never meet their professors and take “asynchronous” courses that provide little if any interaction with faculty. In most cases, faculty focus purely on teaching and can’t offer mentoring in research. Students have few, if any, opportunities for interactive experiences on campus that research shows are a central component of a “transformative” and high-quality education.

Horn counters by noting that “no one's comparing why you go to Southern New Hampshire with why you go to Harvard University, but I think both are extremely high quality with what they're optimized on” which are “a very different set of things.” Horn places the question of quality in context, saying that “quality to me is always relative to the job to be done.” Horn notes that since “Western Governors and Southern New Hampshire University are specifically solely dedicated to teaching and learning, the quality is actually extremely enhanced by the scale because the amount of data they're able to take in on students.” This data enables the massively scaled university to conduct research on teaching and learning to “create enormous gains in the personalized experiences that follow what we know from the learning sciences,” and Horn adds that, “traditional universities are focused on research but know very little about teaching and learning.”

Even with less interaction with faculty, students at mega-universities benefit from intense focus on student support. Institutions like SNHU and WGU have “unbundled the role of the faculty member” and instead provide “a life coach who is with you from day one through the end,” according to Horn. Additional features of these universities include teaching coaches, and additional expertise in instruction within faculty such as WGU’s faculty that is dedicated to assessment.

The Future Of Higher Education

The rapid growth of these giant universities could indeed be a disruption of higher education, where flexibility, affordability, and accessibility take precedence over the traditional campus experience, which fewer students can afford. According to Horn,” when we think about disruption of the higher ed experience, we're not creative enough with how big higher education should encompass.” The disruption of higher education may include other models entirely, even beyond our present-day mega-universities. Yet without a better return on investment, or ROI, many traditional universities are threatened, or as Horn puts it, “there's a lot of institutions and programs today that are negative in ROI and that's the part that needs to get disrupted.”