by Dominic D. J. Endicott and David J. Staley
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The university of the future will be a platform. At Internet scale, such a platform could transform how higher education is delivered, challenging the economics of current colleges and universities, but delivering massive value to consumers.
One definition of a platform is a conceptual or physical space that facilitates exchanges between two or more entities. We are accustomed today to describing some digital businesses as platforms, such as Amazon or Uber or Facebook. In theory, a platform is agnostic as to the kinds of exchanges, or the types of buyers or sellers that utilize the platform, although in reality, the managers of the platform maintain protocols or standards.
Platforms are far from a recent phenomenon. The ancient Athenian Agora, the central space in the middle of the city, was a gathering place for commerce, public oration, celebrations, and other activities. A shopping mall is a kind of platform, a space that houses shops, restaurants, and other enterprises. The mission and purpose of a platform is defined by the activities it facilitates.
When we describe the future of the university as a platform, we mean an institution that incubates many smaller epistemological organizations, such as colleges, institutes, and polytechnics.
The University of Wisconsin in the 1920s acted as a platform when it housed the Experimental College on its campus. This was a Great Books college before there were any great books colleges. The Experimental College was accommodated in its own building, had about 100 students and a dozen faculty, and was otherwise a separate entity within the University of Wisconsin. Although it is not usually described in these terms, Wisconsin was acting as a platform.
The university-as-platform can be said to exist already in the form of the constituent college model. Oxford University, for example, or the City University of New York are made up of a number of independent colleges — not colleges based on disciplines like a college of engineering or a college of arts and sciences. It would be as if Harvard, MIT, Tufts, and Boston College were all confederated together under the umbrella of “The Massachusetts University.”
A university transforms into a platform when it acts as an incubator of new colleges. These need not be large-scale enterprises: like the first colonial colleges or the small denominational colleges that dotted the American landscape, these might be no larger than a hundred students and a dozen faculty.
Or perhaps even smaller. In “Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education,” one of us (Staley) designed the idea of a “microcollege.” Based on the micro school idea, a microcollege might look like Deep Springs College, which has only 27 students and three faculty. A college is formed when there are students prepared to learn and educators ready to teach.
Our argument in “Knowledge Towns” is that making a city or town attractive for remote knowledge workers includes fostering a robust academic environment. For those places looking to begin a brain gain strategy for their regions, the location of a college or university as an anchor institution can be critical. Incumbent universities might transform their business model into serving as a platform, and thus incubate a number of microcolleges across their state or region. These would not be just regional campuses, smaller versions that mimic the host university, but distinct colleges with their own missions tied to the needs and requirements of the specific places in which they have been embedded.
Universities can also harness the potential of the platform model to expand their business model and reach a broader range of markets. When the Co-CEOs of the largest venture capital firm in the world put the higher-ed sector in their sights, as Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz did recently, it is worth considering how this critical sector in American society could be impacted by new business models. The platform university model could be one of the most promising.
