ASU Tempe, Arizona, USA Drone Skyline Aerial Panorama
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 19th 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